Thank you, Madam Chair. It's pretty clear from the Minister's letter that this thing has been going on for the last two years. There has been work with MACA and the community with regard to trying to look at the development of a management plan. Apparently from the letter the Minister wrote, it's not complete. Then you find out that the project has been identified through the regular capital planning process for several years, then all of a sudden it's no longer there. Also with regard to the hamlet operations assistance policy, they did carry out the shoreline erosion work. In 2001-2002 the department implemented the new approach for funding to communities. At that point, the whole idea was to allow the communities to have $100,000 in their budget to carry out what they were going to do. But what we find out is that in the year 2002-2003 the hamlet was also accessing extraordinary funding to support this project from the department, so it was getting funding for this work through a process.

I think it's important to realize that the whole reason of the capital planning process is to have a system so that the public and we, as Members, know where these expenditures are taking place. But the way I see it, basically because there is no process in place to ensure fairness to all the other communities, this is a perfect example of how a community or a department can undermine the whole process of capital allocation and look at the community municipal policies that we have in place to keep the communities accountable. I feel that this process has been going on too long, that the Cabinet and the process of using supplementary appropriations has been abused. Again we're finding out that that's what is happening.

The Department of Municipal and Community Affairs knew two years ago that this was a problem and they were working on it. Why was this not continued through the capital planning process? Yet we find out that there's a new way of investing capital, through a process called supplementary appropriations. That's not the intent of supplementary appropriations. The whole idea of a capital planning process is that's what it is. Some communities up and down the valley don't have capital projects in their riding because they're being told sorry, we have rules, you have to meet these criteria. But in this case, you reinvent the wheel, you find new ways of getting around the whole idea of accountability and also ensuring that there's fairness in the way money is distributed to municipalities and communities up and down the valley.

With that, I know that it's probably a losing battle. I don't know what it's going to take, maybe a motion of non-confidence against this government, because that's where I think we have to go with this one because it doesn't seem like anybody is listening on that side of the House and they can do whatever they want. So that's it.