Of course, we didn’t hear a date here from the Minister, so I guess we’ll leave it to the imagination. It was sometime between August 25th and September 26th which is the
announcement of this amount of money being authorized or promised by Cabinet without any appropriation. I’ll leave it at that. If the Minister doesn’t want to answer the question, that’s fine. Maybe other Members might get back on that and try to pry that information out.
The question is: How pressing was the issue? Why were things deemed so fast moving that we had to circumvent conventional wisdom of a process that we all enshrine and we all believe in, which is consensus government? I don’t see where the pressing need was. I don’t see where things were moving fast where this decision had to be made on a Friday and had to be announced that Friday and circumventing the program. Unless the Minister really wants to clarify that, I have a hard time understanding and believing where the pressing value was and where things were moving fast.
I’ll leave it at that, but my other questions have to do with the fact that I’m assuming that this $20 million is coming out of short-term borrowing, and if so, can we get confirmation? Is this indeed coming out of short-term borrowing and what does that mean now to our short-term borrowing limit, which I believe our cap is at $275 million. Where does this appropriation land on that threshold?