Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to carry on a little bit on the fiscal environment that I was mentioning earlier. I want to make sure I have some things right here. Our annual payments will be about $8 million per year, including a net of about $2 million new dollars each year. After a five-year period we have federal support for extra debt. We will have paid about $40 million for a reduction in the principal of about $10 million, leaving about $150 million in principal debt on the books. Over this same period we’ll reduce our current debt, which is estimated at $215 million at the end of this fiscal year to about $145 million; a difference of minus $70 million over that five-year period. This while servicing almost a billion dollars in new infrastructure as well as the considerable aging infrastructure we have in place.

The projections show that we will do this by unrealistically, in my mind, low annual expenditures and some favourable revenues. Just for perspective, I don’t think that after all the angst and discord that we were able to anywhere near achieve the reductions we wanted between the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 fiscal years. I’d be interested in what the increase was in our O and M between those two years. Yet we’re asking the next Legislative Assembly to not only do better than we did there, but we’re asking them to do better every year. That’s a pretty amazing ask.

My points here are that just because we’re allowed to do this by our federal patron does not mean that there will not be severe implications to the services and infrastructure we provide to our public. That’s the first point. The second one is, because these are unrealistic projections, if we bank on them we will be in even more troubled water than we currently find ourselves.

I don’t see much contingency planning on a large-scale basis by the Department of Finance, but perhaps there is for eventualities that during the life of our term certainly seem to come to pass on a fairly regular basis. I’m wondering what contingency planning we do have on a government-wide basis by the Department of Finance that will inform our remaining term and that of the next Assembly. Recognizing that there are these severe implications.