Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I did earlier this afternoon provide some committee observations. I just wanted to provide a few of my own, and seeing as how we have an opportunity to vote on this deletion, it’s probably a good time to throw them in as well.
Just quickly, the Minister did agree to look into many things, as I highlighted earlier today, and he’s giving me his nod and he’s certainly doing that. I believe he will do that as he’s agreed to follow through.
Just some of the concerns that I’ve had, which is there is a lot of good faith taken in on committee’s side of this equation whether we’re supporting this or not supporting this. Of course, we all know that if he was known as MLA Ramsay only, on this side of the House, he’d probably be having a tough time sitting where we are, accepting that a lot of this is taken strictly on good faith.
That said, a lot of the particulars that have come forward, the way I view it is this is a lot of money being invested on developing a project to the point of where we have to get to understand it, how much it will cost, how much will be involved, how we foresee it being our full expenditure. There’s a lot of work being developed out of this $2.5 million.
At this particular time I’m going to exercise a small amount of caution by saying that I will vote… It’s tricky. I’ll be voting against the motion to delete the money because I think this type of work needs to continue to go through to assess the project on a broader basis. I will say, as I did put to Mr. Ramsay in committee, that we need some clearly defined
milestones to help us understand when we get a full appreciation for the picture of what it’s going to cost, how much involvement. We need to have a clear deciding point when we’re either all in or not at all. He’s agreed to come back with some of those details. I see that this money is being invested in a wise way to help develop the project to a position where we can make a formal decision on the broader issue.
I didn’t have a lot of comments but I just thought that this was probably the only time I’ll speak to it this evening and I wanted to emphasize that I will cautiously be voting for the broader project, which means I will be voting against this motion.