Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think Ms. Lee and Mr. Bell have covered, at least in part, one of the principal concerns that I had about the way we were doing business. In hearing the Minister's opening comments and Mrs. Groenewegen's committee report, I want to get into it a little bit more. I'll briefly try to explain from my point of view where I see the difficulty. I guess, call it the accountability, Mr. Chair.
When I was sitting as a committee member in the previous Assembly and the reports of the Business Credit Corporation or the Development Corporation had come before us, I really couldn't get a handle on how I was to assess either their success or lack of it of their performance, because we were setting up clients and reporting on them on a business basis, a return on investment and number of jobs created and the contributions or investment that would go into these organizations from our lending arms. I was asked to sort of look at them in the sense of, well, we structure them as businesses and now we judge them as business. But, in reality, the majority of them were absolute failures from the point of view of being profitable, and entities that built their own equity and these kind of business measurements.
This is where the comments come in from Ms. Lee. How do we assess the value, the success and the performance of these investments that we make if, in reality, they are made for social purposes? Albeit, maybe for the very best of social purposes such as avoiding excessive income support or welfare or other kinds of subsidies. Those are good reasons. The difficulty I had was being asked to assess this performance on a business basis. What I am hoping is contained in here will be accountabilities, Mr. Chair, that will allow me as an MLA to say, yes, what we are doing is getting in there to help jumpstart profitable businesses that are really going to earn their way. Great! Give me a set of criteria that I can measure success and performance. If we are going to go into something that has a social basis, then I want another set of criteria that I can measure and see if the taxpayer is getting value for their money. Could the Minister address those areas of accountability and performance measurements? Thank you.