Thank you, Madam Chair. In this Assembly and the previous Assembly, for sure, have had very ambitious agendas. We’ve had very significant commitment to trying to beef up our infrastructure. During the life of this government, as I pointed out in the budget address, we have delivered or will have committed to deliver about 1.2 or 1.5 billion dollars of infrastructure. The last government was in the same circumstance.

We made a conscious decision. If I could point out, when we went down, when we hit the big economic crisis in 2008, we made a conscious decision to spend money, like every other government, to do everything we can, and could at the time, to prop up and put money into the economy. As businesses retreated, retrenched, cut expenditures, laid people off, limited their capital and suffered the consequences of the big market downturn, we spent money and we consciously did that as a Legislature to do our part. The federal government did theirs. We took advantage of every cent of the Building Canada programs. We’ve made investments because we know ideally… If we were just going to say we don’t have the money, we wouldn’t be doing Stanton. We’re not going to take any risk. We’re not going to have any sense of vision of making long-term investments. We wouldn’t be doing the Tuk-Inuvik highway. We wouldn’t be doing any of these things.

This is an operational issue. We have almost a $2 billion budget. We have an $800 million borrowing limit. Half of that borrowing limit is taken up on us by things that we don’t drive personally as a government out of our operational money. It’s paid for; NTPC debt, housing, most of the bridge. So in actual fact, for a $2 billion corporation we have roughly a $400 million borrowing room which, in my mind, when we look at the $3.8 billion infrastructure we have, when we look at the things we want to do and we know we need to do with infrastructure is very, very modest.

I would also point out that as we focus on this, when you look at the big picture, we have an Aa1 credit rating, we have one of the best debt to GDP ratios in the country, our interest charges versus our revenue which is maxed out at 5 percent under our fiscal borrowing limit is 1 percent. So we’re a very big, complex operation and this is an operational requirement and things have happened.

We have been dealing with the aftermath and the need to actually continue a lot of those investments because the economy, as we know, hasn’t recovered. Our economy is only 75 percent of what it was back in 2008.

A government’s responsibility is to manage risk, take risk, have enough vision to see when it’s time to make investments, and manage the money and still have things like the Aa1 credit rating. All those things have contributed to what the circumstance is we have today, layered on top with the fire season from last summer, fourth year of a drought that has dropped water levels, and this conscious decision, this wise decision by this Legislature to say we’re not going to sit here and add 13 percent to power rates and then say we’re concerned about the cost of living in the next breath.

So all those factors, Madam Chair, contributed to the circumstance we are in today.