Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am continually struggling with the question of how we meet our capital needs. If we wanted to meet our needs completely and the way we should be, we should probably be spending somewhere between $100 million and $200 million a year on capital. We simply don't have the money to do that right now. As we speak, we have been discussing this and negotiating with Ottawa on our infrastructure needs and doing everything we can to get them to get that message. The Premier is in Ottawa right now dealing with health needs, including capital needs on the health side. So we recognize that the $74 million that we are spending this year, and what we spent in the past, and what we plan on spending in the future is probably not going to meet all of our needs to the extent that we wish they would. So we have to do that. We have to be creative. As I said earlier, we want to look at other ways of doing some major projects with P3, private/public partnerships, other ways of getting big resource companies to help us, so we have to be creative on increasing our capital budget. But to take it out of the operations side, I think would probably not be a wise move right now given the amount of money we have to move to make a difference. Thank you.
Joe Handley on Question 31-14(6): Needs-based Capital Investment
In the Legislative Assembly on February 17th, 2003. See this statement in context.
Further Return To Question 31-14(6): Needs-based Capital Investment
Question 31-14(6): Needs-based Capital Investment
Item 6: Oral Questions
February 16th, 2003
Page 103
See context to find out what was said next.