Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regards to the first issue raised by the Member, we provide weekly updates to MLAs during fire season and we will add a financial component to that to allow Members to track, as do we, the costs and expenditures during fire season.

In regard to the second issue, I want to, of course, concur with the Member that Northerners have reacted very favourably to the $20 million that was used to offset the proposed rate increase, and the reason that we did $20 million - $15 for the rest of this fiscal year, $5 million to carry us over to June – is because we had to give the Public Utilities Board confirmation that we would make NTPC whole for the whole amount, for the entire amount that they were requesting, which was $20 million to cover the fuel charges that were going to be incurred from this month or last month to right through until June, so we did that.

The Member says it was a hasty, ill-thought-out, quick response, cleverly manufactured to circumvent the rules of consensus government, and I would suggest that in fact it was a timely thought out, measured, but very focused and nimble response to a circumstance that came before us that was going to cause extreme hardship, we figured. We were well aware of the concern that we all have about cost of living and this would have been a prime contributor to that.

Sometimes in these kinds of circumstances government is required to act quickly, and we did. We acted quickly. We met the balance not to the satisfaction to the length of time that the Members would have, but I believe we met our commitments

that we needed to under the convention for consensus government, and more importantly, we responded in a timely and effective way to a situation that required a timely and effective response. It wasn’t an attempt to circumvent consensus government but rather an attempt to deal with a circumstance that required what we thought was immediate attention, and as a government we responded accordingly.