Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, colleagues, for allowing me a third round here. I’ll try to be brief.
I appreciate the analogy that the Minister indicated earlier about a credit card. Typically how I look and view the short-term borrowing is very close to a credit card ability where we’re having some revolving money, we make payments and hopefully at the end of the year we get a lump sum so we can pay off our full credit card and we can start the process off again.
I’d like to backtrack to about two years ago when this issue of borrowing increase hit the floor of the House here, where had a $175 million borrowing capacity in our short-term line of credit. At that moment in time, discussion ensued around increasing that to the current $275 million that we have before us now and we are looking at an extra $25 million with this bill.
I guess the question is, we had a credit card that was working fine with the government for, literally, I think it was close to 16 years. Clearly, there have been some fundamental changes vis-à-vis. Again, I understand there are issues of acts of God, little water and fire that basically have caused some issues. But fundamentally something has changed in the way we do business, where this $275 million, this extra $100 million that we increased in our short-term borrowing no less than two years ago has definitely dealt with how we deal with our revolving ins and outs on short-term money revolving in our government.
Can I get some explanation of what are some of those very large, unforeseen, outside of the bigger issues that we talked about here? What were some of those big issues that really have eaten that so-called $100 million of extra grace, so to speak, that we’ve given under this short-term borrowing? There has to be something fundamentally that has changed in the way we do our books. Thank you.