Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Earlier today I referenced in terms of trying to explain people that are unilingual, just an opportunity for them to understand the complexities of how this government disburses within the year the $1.4 billion it’s proposing to spend. My question is to the Minister of Finance.
I know that we seem to be kind of forecasting how it is that we’re going to spend this amount of money within the year. I would like to know if the Minister could apprise this House in terms of perhaps some consideration of a savings and investment strategy or plan that the Minister perhaps might bring to the floor.
Thank you, Mr. Nadli. The honourable Minister responsible for Finance, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we laid out in the budget, we are in fact going to be focusing a lot of our attention on replenishing our depleted cash reserves to put money aside so that in year three or four we will be able to add additional resources and revenues into increasing our commitment to infrastructure in a lot of the key areas. This is going to be done in a number of ways. We’re going to limit the forced growth; we’re going to continue to work on being efficient and effective; we’re going to continue with the attention to how we spend the money within government to avoid unnecessary expenses.
The key piece for us is we’re $656 million in accumulated debt, most of it long term; about $240-some million in short-term debt. We need to be able to engage those savings. We’re projecting revenues that are going to be contingent on what happens globally. It’s also going to be contingent upon things that are constantly in flux, the main one being corporate income tax. Throughout all that we do have a plan that will in fact make us more fiscally stable and able to invest more greatly in infrastructure and at the same time spend $1.4 billion on programs and services.
My follow-up question is perhaps my last one too. Has the Department of Finance considered perhaps the concept of an investment fund that the government would consider and implement right away? One of the concepts that’s been, already I think people know it, is the idea of a Heritage Fund.
I agree with the Member about the Heritage Fund and its role. We’ve committed to when we do devolution and when we get into year three and four, we’ll be looking at trying to finally put some seed money into that very important fund.
It was also raised in the House today about trying to increase the money for investment in businesses to the Minister of ITI. We had to, in fact as part of our financial restructuring, turn back the Opportunities Fund where we had about $120 million sitting in a bank for investment, but it wasn’t covered by our borrowing limit; it would have gone against our borrowing limit. We do have a number of areas we’re looking at. Some will happen in due course here in year three and four.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
