Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The user-pay initiatives that we have been talking about as part of our
1996-97 and 1997-98 business plans cover a wide range of government services to itself. Some of those services are fairly easy to move out of, simply by having the Department of Public Works cast its resources onto the departments that currently have this service delivered on their behalf. The telephone services was a good example of that, where we were paying the bills on behalf of the government centrally and had the money in our budgets to do so. When we were doing it that way, there was no incentive for the departments to save any money because we simply paid the bills on their behalf. However, in our dealings with the phone company, we get a better rate on the phone costs because we pay as one organization rather than 15 to 20 different departments and agencies. So we have maintained the responsibility for paying the bills centrally, but it is a computerized information system that requires a very limited bureaucracy. It is a simple matter of the system charging the departments for the money that is spent on their telephone bills.
So there are those kinds of creative solutions that we will be looking for as we move ahead with the property management user-pay initiative. The difference in property management is at least in the short term, we have a variety of leases with organizations that provide us with office space. So it isn't as though government departments can simply say we want smaller, better or less costly office space, so we are going to divest ourselves of this lease and go somewhere else. We have to fulfil our obligations under those leases and so, at least for the next three to five years, we are going to have to continue to pay the people who are currently providing us with space under contractual arrangements. This one is a little more difficult to do with user-pay than some of the others.
The important thing to recognize as we implement the user-pay initiatives is that at least the actual cost of the organizations to do their business will be reflected in their budgets. It won't be artificially in the budget of the Department of Public Works, in the Department of Personnel, in the Financial Management Board Secretariat. It will be in the hands of the departments and we will know exactly what their programs and services cost because it will be reflected in their main estimates documents. So for the short term, there will be some central administration of the billings, but we should be able to deal with that as some of these leases expire.