Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This bill that’s before the House is before the House because this Borrowing Limit Authorization Act is a piece of territorial legislation that is controlled by this Legislature. It’s to deal with, as I’ve indicated before, short-term borrowing. It’s a type of line of credit. This has nothing to do with the federal government. We are having our discussions on our borrowing limit with the federal government which will be concluded, our long-term borrowing limit with the federal government that will be hopefully concluded here by the end of March.
The Member also had a question about what type of credit do we have. We have an Aa2 credit rating, second highest that’s available, up there with many other well run jurisdictions, businesses and corporations. We have audits done. How do we police this? How do we make sure we manage ourselves? That’s our job collectively. That’s my job as Finance Minister. That’s the Cabinet’s job, the Premier’s job to provide the daily operations. We have our budgets passed every year. We have a significant number of checks and balances built into how we spend money and how we manage our interest costs and all the other pressures. Which is why even as we sit here today, one of the reasons we’re getting a good hearing on the borrowing limit with the federal government is because they know that we are very well run fiscally. We have almost no long-term debt. We have some short-term debt. We’re managing ourselves effectively. We’re doing all the things we should be doing. We have the lowest GDP-to-debt ratio. We have some of the lowest debt servicing costs in the country, second only I believe to Alberta maybe, and maybe the Yukon. Some jurisdictions are paying eight and 10 percent of their budget just to service debt costs. We are not in that situation at all. This just allows us to manage our money more effectively to be more responsive to the concerns and needs of MLAs to better manage programs and services that we deliver across the land.
So this is just a tool to allow us to borrow up to $275 million on a short-term basis should it be required, always under the scrutiny of myself as Finance Minister and this House, the various committees. We have to go to Cabinet to get Cabinet approval for a lot of the decisions that are made through the Financial Management Board. We have built in all the checks and balances. This
allows us just to be more, I believe, effective, efficient and responsive.