Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I want to talk about two words and those words are...not Highway 7…
---Laughter
…passive restraint. I am not referring to a self-locking seatbelt but rather some very slick language used by our Finance department.
So, before we can get to passive restraint, we have to understand a bit of the context. For starters, if you have not noticed, many Regular Members are concerned at the number of job vacancies facing this government, and if you are from a small community, you should be paying attention.
Yet other Members have asked how the dormant or inactive jobs continue to get financed during the budget process year after year. To the crux of the issue, many have asked if specific jobs are deliberately left vacant so these wage dollar funds can meet other priorities or offset other operational pressures with the assistance of cleverly worded policies.
I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, many Members have tried to get resolve to these questions and the Finance curtain is slowly starting to open.
Compounding our deficit spending, also called our debt wall, or wall of worry, is the Finance department’s miscalculation of personal and corporate income tax revenues to the tune of over $30 million in this current budget.
If you add all this up and even without the resource revenue debt, you have yourself a perfect storm of financial concern. So in the past when our Financial Management Board found themselves in a sticky or tight situation, they initiated what they called a Passive Restraint Policy. Now, in my own words, it was a policy that directed departments’ restraint in operational spending to achieve savings. So I guess a sort of tightening of the belt, if you will.
How effective this tightening of the belt was is a mystery because nothing has ever been tabled in the House, reviewed by any third party, nor publicly discussed by anyone in Finance. So, in essence, for many Members of this House, passive restraint is on the same level as chasing Peter Pan. First, you have to believe and then you have to leave the real world to go to never-never land where the passage of time is ambiguous to try to find answers. Unfortunately, some of us refer to this last step as what we do in the committee room every day.
Seriously, and in the face of our financial debt wall, I will have a number of questions later today for our Minister of Finance, so he can clear up what our Financial Management Board is doing to mitigate our losses in revenue and deficit spending and if he is using passive restraint protocols in his 2014-2015 budget. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Before we go on, Members, I’d also like to welcome back former Sergeant-at-Arms and Deputy Chief Electoral Officer Ms. Nicole Latour. Welcome to the House, Ms. Latour.
The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
