Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I brought up in my Member’s statement, I have questions about what the government’s plans are for our Business Incentive Policy. I understand that Minister Bob McLeod, with ITI, is going to be putting together an options paper to look at that.
I feel like I’m having déjà vu, because it feels like every government I have been involved in has tried to figure out a way to kill the BIP. Then ensued a very long and heated debate, and then a decision not to do it — for very good and sound reasons, I might add.
Someone has already alluded to the grandfathered nature of our BIP under the free-trade and interprovincial trade agreement. If we do away with it, we will not get it back in its current form. I think it is important that we look very seriously at this. Now, I’d like to say, Go out and do extensive consultation, but I happen to know that just a very few short years ago we went out and did very extensive consultation at a fairly good price. I would like to ask the.... At that time, I should say there was an agreement to set up a monitoring program to monitor the BIP for three years so that a cost-benefit analysis could be done. What is the status of that monitoring and that report?