Thank you, Madam Chair. The beautiful thing about being a Regular Member is that there are times we’ll have differing points of view and sometimes I have that with the Member for Weledeh. In this case I agree with him 100 percent. I just want to make sure that’s on the record.
Taking that one step further with respect to this amount of money and looking at the breakdown that we see here, the breakdown I want to make reference to is just the electricity component itself. We’re seeing a variance percent here of about 15 percent in terms of a supplemental, which is quite a bit higher than the rest of the utilities. Again, the Minister made reference to CMHC and stuff, but really we’re talking about a supplementation of $1.7 million here.
I want to focus my question around that 15 percent variance and the reason why I say that is if one has to go through a lot of the old Hansards and look at some of the comments made by certain Ministers or the Minister of Finance, we’re hearing that the electricity rates being used by the end user from the Housing Corporation has been relatively constant
or consistent, I think is what nomenclature has been used. As a Regular Member, if I’m hearing that if the consumption has been relatively constant, if we use that as a variable in the equation and we know that the government pays market rates and it’s subsidized through the residential power for these housing authorities, somehow this math doesn’t make sense because we know that electricity rates haven’t risen by 15 percent in the 2010-2011 budget year. They’ve gone up somewhat; I don’t know that percentage off the top of my head. So I guess if usage is constant and the rates are slightly high, how is it that that percentage could be so high? Mathematically there’s something missing in that equation. If the Minister could maybe clarify that and shed some light on that, that would definitely help me appreciate and understand the math here a little bit better.