Thank you, Mr. Chair. My comments are similar to my colleagues’. In looking at the amount of this appropriation and the impact that it has on our Reserve Fund, it’s pretty mind-blowing. This appropriation is some $30 million. About $7 million is recoverable, but it leaves us with $24 million or so which, added to our $1.7 million negative already in our Reserve Fund, brings our Reserve Fund up to $26 million in the hole.

I agree with my colleagues that some of these increased pressures happen year after year after year and we should be able to predict them, and I’m very glad to hear that we have added to the base for, I think, four items, I believe the Minister mentioned. That, in my mind, is how we should be budgeting. We finally got to the point about two years ago now that we budgeted a far more realistic figure for fire activities during the summer. Previously, we budgeted an absolute bare minimum and every year the department had to come back and ask for a supplementary appropriation when we knew full well that we were not going to spend just the minimum amount in that budget.

I think being more realistic in what it’s actually going to cost us is a good idea, and I’m very glad to see that some of these things have been moved into base funding for the Department of Health and Social Services. I would encourage the Department of Finance to look with a very critical eye when they’re doing the next budget, look with a critical eye over the last two or three years and don’t budget below what we have tended to spend on a particular item. Budget what we think we’re going to spend in the next year.

I think sometimes we underestimate in our budgeting. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe because it looks better or maybe because, you know, yeah, well, that’s okay, we can always come back and ask for more money. But as I’ve said often, we can’t do that in our own personal budgets. We have X amount of dollars in our household budget and we can’t go back to ourselves and ask for more. Well, we can, but it puts us into debt. That’s the situation that we’re in here.

My question to the Minister is: With $26 million in the hole, I believe it was mentioned that we are going to have to incur short-term borrowing in order for us to get over this hump and this lack of funds and cash flow and so on, so what are the costs that we are going to incur because of this overspending and because of the negative amount in our Reserve Fund?