I see the passion and I hear the passion with the department on this. I applaud the work that the department is doing. I want to say that, for the record, but I also want to say what’s modest for some may be seen as extremely high risk for others. As a Member of this House, I need to make sure that all voices are thought of when we’re doing these large, monumental and paradigm shifts in thinking when it comes to expenditure control and borrowing limits. I do appreciate what I’ve heard, but I’m doing my due diligence, Madam Chair.
As we heard from the Minister – and again this is before committee, but because it was brought up, I’ll speak to it – that there’s a borrowing plan within the new Financial Administration Act that would help with these types of processes in the future. Unfortunately, we don’t have that plan before us today. This is a tool that I’m assuming, because I haven’t seen the matrix and the analytics behind it that would definitely help us understand cash flow and help us better understand our spending and our spending habits. Because it’s not before the House, it’s almost moot to be discussing it at this point. I’m enthused that we will see it, but it’s not here.
I want to leave this with this last issue here. That’s going back to the issue of firefighting expenditures for the 2014 season. It makes it very difficult, extremely difficult for a Member on this side of the House to look at borrowing more money or allowing the increase of a borrowing limit when we haven’t done the full cost accounting, that full exercise which was promised by the Minister at least half a dozen times publicly. I’m enthused we are getting there. But this sounds like an exercise that’s not going to take place until way into March or April, which is way after the time period in which we’ve got to make a decision for this bill, which is problematic in my books. That’s the cart before the horse. Unless we can do a full cost accounting, it makes it extremely difficult for me to understand the rigours of where our costs were for that fire season. How did we spend our money? How was our MARS agreement? How did it work? What was our overtime position? How did we use our contractors? The list goes on and on. I still haven’t had answers to my questions and I have a lot of questions. I have $60 million worth of questions that still need to be asked and answered.
I’m going to leave it at that. Again, I’m a bit disappointed that there’s a lot of faith that’s coming to the floor of the House here and bringing substantiation of this magnitude. We need to increase $25 million more to our short-term borrowing because this is what we need. We need the vision. We need to take the risk. Clearly, this was granted two years ago. We granted this government $100 million of leeway to do exactly what we’re talking about. For us to come back two years later to top it up another $25 million is extremely problematic for me to wrap my head around.
With that, Madam Chair, I would like to thank you and thank the department and committee for allowing me the opportunity to speak to this. Thank you.