Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have similar comments with regard to this supplementary appropriation. I, too, have expressed before and I still feel that we budget for our forest fire suppression completely wrongly. I think our residents and constituents understand sort of a home budget where you estimate what you’re going to spend and then you budget for that amount of money. What we do here for forest fire suppression is we budget for the absolute minimum, knowing full well that by the time we have mobilized our forces, the minimum has been spent and there’s going to be a need to come back for extra funds.
The Minister has said that there were some good suggestions at committee and I’m very pleased to hear now that they will be considered. It would seem to me that funding the forest fires suppression budget on a 10-year average amount would probably be quite successful and it would certainly leave us with a better idea of what it’s going to cost us.
There are pretty much two items in this particular bill which make up this supplementary appropriation and one of them is the $6 million for the forest fire suppression budget and the other is $1.1 million, give or take, for devolution AIP. Those two items are about $7.8 million, and with the amount that we have in our reserve fund, which is four-point-something million dollars, we’re left in the hole for
about $3.1 million. We are not even halfway through this budget year and we are already in the hole in terms of our reserve. So should we encounter any further emergencies in the rest of the budget year, we are going to go further in the hole. I know that things certainly are not going to fall apart, but what it means is that we are probably going to have to borrow money along the way in order to keep our budget in line.
If after the department considers some of the suggestions with regard to the forest fire suppression budget and they decide to continue with the sort of policy that they have now, which is to budget for a minimal amount of money, my recommendation to the department is that a portion of the reserve at the beginning of any budget year must be set aside and allocated to forest fire suppression, because we’ve got a reserve and we know we need money for forest fire suppression, so we need to allocate a specific portion of the reserve for that purpose. It will then let us know upfront how the budget is going to play out. What we do now is budget for the minimum but then we also expect the reserve to cover all contingencies and don’t recognize at the outset that we’re going to have to spend more money for fire.
I really don’t have any other comments than that. Many of the other items that are here in this bill are offset by other revenues, and that’s a good thing. I seriously encourage the department to reconsider how we budget, especially for forest fire suppression.