Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regard to the energy money, renewable energy, the majority of the $60 million that we’ve spread over the three or four years is going to be accounted for through O and M, through contributions to things like Arctic Energy Alliance, to communities, or to the funds we’ve put out there to help businesses and communities improve their energy efficiency. We’ve also instituted standards for housing, our EnerGuide 80. All our new buildings and retrofits for government buildings have to exceed the National Building Code by 25 percent in terms of energy efficiencies. Some of that money is captured.
The money to upgrade our own buildings to biomass or other forms of alternate energy is
included in this budget. The other ones won’t be captured here. When it comes to IT infrastructure, I’ll just point out that one of the big ticket items in the budget is the rollout of our new financial information system, affectionately known as SAM, which has been rolled out this year with a minimum of disruption, I’d like to add, and I commend all the people who worked hard to do that. We don’t want to be tarred with the same brush as the folks in Ontario. In fact, we’ve gone to great lengths to avoid anything that would cause us problems. If we work with Health on electronic health records, we’re going to be very cognizant of the need for full transparency and accountability of how we do things, following our contractual processes so that we in fact don’t become painted with that brush that the Member has mentioned here.
The issue of environmental liabilities is one that more work has to be done. We, at this point, tend not to do environmental assessments until a building is going to be surplused off. At that point, that work is done. There is, if there are ways to do that, as we look at our condition reports on buildings and as we do our continued assessment on deferred maintenance, identify those areas which could be identified as having environmental liabilities that will require expenditures at this House. Thank you.