Thank you, Madam Chair. Over the course of the last year or so the issue of job vacancy has been talked about in the House. It’s been literally quizzed to death, you know, for the lack of a better use of the terminology and statistics. We have about 1,000 jobs that are vacant – I’m using whole numbers here – in which at any given time there’s a number of them that are being listed to fill.

So for basic math, let’s say 500 of those jobs perpetually are not being filled during the course of the year. Now, it might be high or it might be low, that’s not the point, at an average wage rate of $100,000. So if we have 500 jobs at any given time, rolling average for the course of the whole year where we appropriate and set aside, on average, $100,000 for each one of those jobs, that’s $50 million.

Can the department indicate to me, what happens to those so-called 400 or 500 jobs per year where they’re still left vacant, they’re unfilled and we’re hearing there’s a passive restraint of $10 million? I’m talking almost five times that amount of money, given the statistics that we have been given in the House. Can I get some rationalization as to are we talking about a bigger sum of money out there that we could be re-profiling and we’re not? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. When it comes to the vacancies there’s any number, a host of things that could affect those particular jobs and you’d have to go over them almost position by position. Is it maternity leave issues? Is it a transfer assignment issue? Is it one where it’s difficult to fill and we’re doing a contract arrangement? As a government we haven’t fully funded the benefits for departments. We fund $17 million and it’s actually $23 million, so there’s a 6 percent spread and departments have been told to fund that from within. So what departments have done historically is looked at their vacancy rate to free up that money, which can be a significant amount of money if you have a very large staff complement and you’re short 6 percent on pay and benefits. You have to also be able to absorb, in some cases, retirement costs, which is an issue we’ve been making efforts, as a government, to in fact now start to fully fund departments so that we can get away from that and have, as the Member’s pointed out, a clear accounting of what money is being used and where it’s being spent. So, Madam Chair, those are some of the issues that would eat up some of that money that is there in vacant positions. Thank you.

I’ll leave that question as is. I’m still a bit perplexed doing the math. Given the vacancy rate that we have, the number of positions we have and still, at the end of the day, it appears that there’s money being tied up into vacant, unfilled positions to which, I believe, would have a huge benefit of accessibility should that money be profiled, or re-profiled for cases such as this where we need short-term money, especially near the end of the year when we’re really hitting the odometer reset in less than a month for April 1st. So again, it’s an accounting exercise of large proportion, but I did have to ask that.

Changing gears, Madam Chair, I want to talk about the corporate and personal income tax, or the collection of them. Last year at this time, if I recall, we were dealing with a collection mishap, or a collection faux pas, where we missed the mark, so to speak, on both the collection of corporate and personal income tax to the potential tune of about $38 million. That number is very slightly in some of the narratives in the House in the past year, but for the sake of argument, this was a $38 million miscalculation.

Can the department indicate, you know, we fast forward to today, what circumstances today have affected our short-term borrowing with potentially the miscalculation again with the short-term borrowing in relation to personal and corporate income tax collection? Thank you.

I’d just like to comment on Mr. Dolynny’s final comments about vacancies. I want to acknowledge that it is an area, as we move forward and as we hew to that very tough line of not having our expenditures exceed our revenues, that there is going to be, I would suggest, ongoing scrutiny of the whole area of staffing vacancies. We have over 5,000 employees. We fund a veritable army of casuals and relief workers and it’s roughly an $800 million part of our budget, which is a very, very significant amount of money.

Clearly, as we move forward and look at how we’re doing things and how we account for things, that is an area, as the Member pointed out, that’s going to require continued scrutiny. I just wanted to acknowledge that to the Member.

In regards to our estimates on income tax, we’ve been relying on federal projections. We’ve indicated that we’re going to move to our own five-year rolling average. The federal projections are based on a snapshot in time and they look forward through that lens of that snapshot and they give us numbers. It also points to the vagaries and the fluidness of how you file corporate income tax, the latitude that corporations have. When they file, how they file, how much they file, where they file are some of the things that we have to stand and wait to see what’s going to happen. In the case of this particular circumstance where we have to repay a payment because we were overpaid because of the calculations and projections that were off, we have to manage all of those things and it’s not, clearly, an exact science.

I’ll ask the deputy to provide some more detail in regards to that particular issue for Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Aumond.

Thank you, Mr. Aumond. Mr. Dolynny, your time has expired again. Any other Members for general comments on Bill 43? Mr. Dolynny.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Minister Miltenberger.

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.

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.

We have come up with a final supplementary request for the cost of fire season, which is roughly $60 million when you look at all the money including the money we had in the budget. We can account for that. What is being done, the full cost accounting, since the end of fire season is an operational review of how we are structured, how we’ve done business, the final accounting of what our expenditures were, communication issues. We’ve heard any number of suggestions from the communities on the issue of fire smarting, the command and control structure of firefighting, all those types of things.

The actual money piece is there and I appreciate the Member saying he has $60 million worth of questions. I have to say if that’s the case, then we would be providing $60 million worth of answers, which I believe we can do. I take the Member’s point, but I want to reassure him the money issue has already been decided for fire season. The operational review isn’t going to change that bottom line. It will help us with our planning as we go forward, which is what we intend to do and we’re going to get in front of committee as soon as we can. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Any further general comments? If committee is agreed that there are no further general comments, can we now proceed to clause-by-clause review of the bill? Agreed?

Okay, so we will pass by the page which has the bill number and the title and go to the clauses. Bill 43, An Act to Amend the Borrowing Authorization Act, clause 1.

---Clauses 1 and 2 approved

Thank you. Bill 43, An Act to Amend the Borrowing Authorization Act, as a whole.

Thank you. Does committee agree that Bill 43, An Act to Amend the Borrowing Authorization Act, is now ready for third reading?

Agreed. Thank you. Bill 43 is now deemed ready for third reading. Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Thank you, senior officials. I will now ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to please escort the witnesses from the Chamber.

We will now return to our main estimates. We were working on the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. I’d like to ask Minister Miltenberger if he’d like to bring witnesses into the Chamber.

Yes, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Does committee agree?