Thank you, Mr. Chair. As much as I would like to support this motion, from what I understand there are a few challenges with the current aircraft, keeping them operating and up to standards. As you know, in this day and age there are a lot of standards that we have to follow and I think that moving forward with new aircraft will live up to those standards and have safer equipment for forestry crews.

Also, the second part of the motion, working with the School of Community Government, in the past ENR has always had suppression crews on their own. We do have fire departments in our communities, but they focus on our actual community and suppression crews tend to defend the communities and around the community.

Moving forward, I think that is something that we need to bring back. I mentioned that, even within the last year here, even before this big fire season that we had. We didn’t seem to act on that and we see the consequences; you know, scrambling around, last minute. It seems that we are always doing crisis control.

It always helps to be prepared for major disasters like this. We were very fortunate this year that we did manage to control the fire, but now, moving forward, we have to do a better job as government to be prepared. I really strongly recommend that we put back those suppression crews that we have taken out within the last 10 years. I could name a few communities offhand, but I’m sure the department knows that very well. Moving forward, I would like to see those put back in place.

To the motion, unfortunately, I can’t support that. Thank you.