Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member has been in this Assembly 16 budgets, as have I, and we’ve talked since that time about taxes, resource royalty taxes, mining taxes, ways to raise revenue. We’ve tried hotel taxes and road tolls. We contemplated other taxes, as well, increases to the payroll tax. We’ve lived through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression in the 1930s where we had to be very careful in terms of further negatively impacting the business community at a time when they were suffering significant loss.
The challenge for the 17th Assembly is going to be
we are going to create an instrument, and this fund is not tied to devolution, this fund is not tied to a resource royalty sharing agreement. It was initially in there for discussion but it ended up after everything was said and done to be just a savings fund, a heritage fund that would be controlled by the Legislative Assembly and they will have to determine, looking at their budgets, revenues and expenditures, if there’s an ability or a willingness to put any funds into this program. I would suggest to the Member that there will be significant attention being paid to the concern that the Member has raised that there won’t be much support if we’re going to be cutting programs to put money into this savings program, so it will have to be done carefully with good thought and consideration. But I’m not in a position to give any guarantees about what developments may happen in any particular region or constituency and whether they will be able to keep a percentage of the royalties in the region for whatever use may be deemed necessary.
I would point out that with the pipeline we do have a $500 million socio-economic agreement that’s contingent upon the pipeline going ahead, and that was negotiated as part of that project. It has nothing to do, necessarily, with this Heritage Fund, but it addressed some of the issues that the Member made reference to. Thank you.