Thank you, Madam Chair. Just a few comments. Everybody is tying the opening comments and the budget together. I just wanted to mention a few things. The Minister is right when he says that yesterday was the first step, especially in these initiatives for revenue generating by putting it out there in the budget. It seemed to be accepted fairly well yesterday, I didn't hear too much in the Great Hall afterwards.
However, I did get about three calls today that are very concerned about the government starting to introduce taxes. As soon as you mention taxes, we can do all of the explaining we want, but what the people out there see is added costs to the cost of living. I can see that taxes are not good, they are no good at any time and I know that we don't want to do it. It becomes an act of does it benefit us enough to make it worthwhile doing. A lot of these we are hoping they are going to bring in some revenues to the government and we've put some projections out there. But I am really concerned when we look at the personal income tax. I think we are looking at hopefully generating close to $1 million with that. If it includes any administration whatsoever, we are doing it for absolutely nothing. We are just putting taxes out there just to, I think, upset a lot of the people. I certainly have some concerns in going back to my constituency and talking to them about increased taxes. I know we've tried to do as much as we can to mitigate the effects on lower income families, but if we have to give it all back to make it feasible, then there is not much sense in doing it. So I don't know how much administration cost there will be, added administration costs if any, but I will tell you from the way I look at it, it wouldn't take very much to totally mitigate anything that we are going to gain from those taxes. I don't think we have started to hear back yet from our constituents as to what they think on these taxes. I think we have already heard from one large corporation that says they will be filing their taxes outside the Territories because they have an office somewhere else. That could be possible and we would lose there with corporate taxes.
My question is on the cost of insurance premiums. This is an industry that seems to be running out of control, this insurance. I don't think that our government has a lot of say into the insurance industry but, again, I see that you identify $1.624 million of savings in insurance premiums, and then you go on in the next page to say that because of taking on the responsibility for self-insuring, the government is taking on a lot more for risk, and a portion of that savings will be re-enlisted into strengthening this program of risk control. Again, if we are going to be setting up a whole bureaucracy again now for risk management, how much is that going to cost us if we are saving $16 million and we spend $2 million? Do we have any idea what we are looking at when we say a portion of this premium will be put back to risk management because of the added risk that the government is taking on? Again, are we really doing this to save money or are we just going to spend it somewhere else? Thank you, Madam Chair.