Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I too have some grave concerns with the new process that has been implemented to consider capital and doing away with the old capital planning process and establishing a new process made up of deputy ministers. For me, that is a total lack of consideration for the elected representatives of this House and elected individuals in our communities to have a say on how the capital is going to be arrived at and how those issues will be prioritized.

Mr. Speaker, the biggest concern I have is the way with this formula has been put together and the question of needs. My concern, Mr. Speaker, is that the small communities that may not have the population base or the demand by numbers will always lose out. If you use determination on need, you will always be outnumbered by the larger communities because their needs will be higher than the needs in smaller communities, where they will not even have an opportunity to be considered in many of these projects because of the size of the project and the question of need.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important that this government rethinks this. My concern, Mr. Speaker, is that we have to do more to ensure there is a process that will involve communities and community representatives. Even in the grey times of the 13th Assembly when we had a deficit situation, the community still had input. There was a call letter sent out by the Premier to allow communities to have a say in what projects they wanted through this process. I see they have been totally eliminated from having a say in any capital projects where in some cases, capital has been totally eliminated by the five-year capital planning process.

My question is to the Minister of FMBS is exactly why has your department not considered the implications of this new change to small communities?