Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Todd. Those are very nice words that the Premier stated earlier concerning community empowerment, community consultation and community priorities. I had a problem with that because my community last year had put as a priority the community hall. As most people know, we do not have a community hall in our community, and our community has grown a lot. I addressed that concern and it was deferred out of the capital plan and supposedly went into the plan this year. I asked a question to the Minister for Municipal and Community Affairs and I was told that my community had decided that the
community hall was not needed and now we would do modifications to the gymnasium. Then when I went back to consult with my community because I believe we have to consult, we have community empowerment, and so on and so forth, they told me they did not know what I was talking about. My question then is on the recreation centre complex in the Minister's riding that we talked about earlier. One of the main thrusts of that as Mr. Morin just said was community empowerment and how we consulted with community, and that was a priority of that community. In my case, it was a priority of my community. Arbitrarily, the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs has changed our capital budget and we have gone from one million dollars down to $250,000 to change the scope of the project.
I will read a letter, just a couple of lines, to give you an idea of where I am coming from. It says here, "At no time has our council or administration been party to any agreement to defer or alter the above-referenced project, the community hall. In fact, all modifications have been made without consultation with the community. Although disappointed, the council continue to plan for our community hall for the construction of 1997/98 only to discover last month and subsequent five year capital plans that arbitrarily changes were made again without consultation. The amount allocated now in 1997/98 has been reduced to $250,000 and the project scope to gym modifications."
My questions, of course, is the nice words the Premier has just said about community empowerment does not mean a hill of beans unless it is something that is going to be put down and actually acted on. My question is, what does he mean when he says community empowerment, when he says community consultation? Because, in this case, a major project has not had any type of community consultation, and in this case, again, the project was deferred out of a capital budget and we lost $750,000 in that.
The third point being, the scope of the whole project was changed to some gymnasium modifications. So, maybe Mr. Morin could tell me that first of all.
