Thank you, Madam Chair. I thank the Member for his comments. As we all know, the draft capital budget was presented to Members back in June of this year, so it was early in the process.
There have been a number of briefings on how the capital budget process actually works. We have a formula where all of the projects are run through and they’re ranked on a priority basis. Based on the amount of money that’s available, the highest priority projects are funded on that basis. For every project, there are five criteria that are used. One is the safety of people, the safety of assets, the environment, financial – whether there are other funding sources for the project, whether we’re talking 50 cent dollars or 30 cent dollars – and if this is for program and service enhancements. So all of those projects are run through that.
Also, there is what we call red flag projects. Those are the ones where a political decision has to be made in terms of whether there’s funding available. Essentially that’s how the capital planning process works.
We worked with the committees to come up with this proposed capital budget that we are discussing here today.
On the budget limit right now, we’ve talked about it but we recognize that if we’re going to do anything
with regard to hydro, the budget limit will be something we’ll have to address.
Arctic Tern, that building is being fixed up by Public Works and it’s still to be determined what it’s to be used for. It’s identified as a surplus building.
With regard to dental, we’ll bring that to the Department of Education, Culture and Employment to see what we can do to address that. Thank you for those comments.