Caroline Wawzonek

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, it should be $64,740,000 I believe, Madam Chair. Let me just confirm that or actually, I'll just ask the deputy minister if he has the page open in front of him.

Thank you, Madam Chair. It's just delayed in some fashion and that's why it's being carried over for completion. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, on my left is the deputy minister of finance, Bill MacKay, and on my right is Terence Courtoreille, deputy secretary to the financial management board.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I mean, departments certainly don't need to apply to carry over their funds. I mean, that's where we get into the situation where, you know, each department does have their projects for which they are responsible. Obviously Infrastructure has a fair chunk that they're delivering on behalf of others as well. But it is up to an individual department if they want to seek to have a carryover or not. I would, yeah, and I can't really speak for those individual decisions. But if it overtly doesn't meet the criteria of the "carryover" definition, that may be a reason not to...

Madam Chair, take that to the deputy secretary, please.

Abstain.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, this spring's culvert work would come out of what would have been appropriated as part of the usual appropriation. So this is for work that was underway or not completed but underway or begun last year. The annual amount that is budgeted for culvert work I gather is $7.5 million, and that remains unchanged. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, so I would say that the Member is correct insofar as by having a large capital plan, we wind up that we are not going to be able to completely spend, if you will, and it may be difficult to know in advance which project is or is not going to go ahead. So you know, there's inevitably going to be some amount that does not get spent, and that's never going to be a perfect projection.

By having the large capital, we are not necessarily impacted immediately or taking away from operations. The operations budget is still, you know, existing and being developed on...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So there isn't, as part of the overall fiscal plan or picture, a capital reserve. The supplementary reserve, which we spoke about yesterday, yes, that was sitting at $35 million this year and is definitely seeing a fair bit of pressure on it right now. But when we're funding capital projects, you have to fund the capital projects 50 percent out of surplus dollars and then the other 50 percent would typically come from some form of borrowing.

So to the extent that we are eating in to or increasing our capital spend, we are drawing that down from the projected surpluses...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So I mean, there's different and Madam Chair, let me just address the confidentiality issue quickly if I might. I don't have a clock in front of me, but I'll try and be succinct.

Look, I do think we can do a different way of presenting this information. This wasn't raised to me in advance, and that's fine. But I do think there's ways of doing it. There's concerns around the longterm plan and concerns around sharing the budgets on the long term. Some of these projects are multiyear projects so sharing what's lapsing inevitably winds up sharing what some of the budgets...