Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s hard to know where to start after my colleague’s comments, but I am totally in support of this motion.

I fail to understand how voting against money to look at different energy sources is not going to impact my bottom line and my power rates, and everybody else’s bottom line in their power rates.

I have to say I was quite dismayed when I looked at this year’s budget and realized that we were going to be reducing our input into research on energy and energy projects, that we have pretty much slashed it almost to the bone. I felt that in the last Assembly our initiative to put $60 million over four years into energy projects and research and developing new projects, we were just starting to get somewhere, and I thought that we were making progress and we were finding alternate energy sources.

The Minister of Finance has a number of times stated in the budget that choices are being made. The government is making choices, we are making choices, he says, and absolutely we are making choices. One of the choices that this government has made is to subsidize our power rates to the tune of some $34 million. I fail to understand how that can be construed as a positive step forward. All we’re doing is taking money and putting it onto something which is going to carry on ad infinitum and forever. Our power rates absolutely are going to increase if we keep doing the same thing over and over and over and we don’t look to find a different way of producing our power. We are going

to end up spending more and more money. It’s like banging our head against the wall and I really don’t want to do that. My father used to say quit banging your head against the wall, and he would say it feels really good when you stop. So I think probably we should stop banging our head against the wall and we should look to try and find different ways of producing our energy.

I think that this motion, albeit doesn’t have specifics in it and I wouldn’t want it to have specifics because I think there needs to be an opportunity for the government to identify how the money is going to be used on which projects and there’s a number of projects from the previous Assembly that were not finished, that were started and could be carried on with. There’s a number of other projects which are certainly waiting to be done. Fifteen million dollars in any one year needs to be put into the budget so the government can look at it and say this is where we need to go.

We have to start fixing the problem at the bottom. We have to start looking at how we produce our energy, how we heat our homes, what kind of power we have, and where it’s sourced, and we have to fix it at that level. That, in the long run, is the only way that we’re going to bring our costs down.

The cost of living has been referenced a number of times. It’s going to be referenced a lot. Power is a huge part of our cost of living and it’s one that, you know, constantly goes up. We’re looking at a 25 percent increase or something in our cost of power over the next three years. I’m not looking forward to that, but if we don’t try to solve the problem at its source, it’s going to be another 25 percent in another 10 years or so.

So I really feel that this is a forward thinking motion. I think the couple of things in the whereases, government revenues have increased in this budget year. We are looking at a budget increase of 9.5 percent in revenues. So the government is choosing to use that increase in revenues in different ways. I feel that this is one way that we should be using it as opposed to be putting it into the subsidy.

So I am in support of the motion, Mr. Speaker, and I would encourage my colleagues to vote in support of this motion as well. Thank you.