Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to welcome the department here today. It’s nice to see some familiar faces.
I do have some general comments, and if I have the time when we get to detail, I might drill down a little bit more.
There are a couple of areas, just as observation, to wet my whistle, so to speak, in terms of department performance in the last year.
One of them is under the procured shared services. This is basically one year under our belt on this consolidation of buying and savings. The concern I have is have we seen any type of significant savings by consolidating this under one roof? It may be a difficult question to answer, but it was one
of the pillars or guiding goals of the department in making it a bit more cost effective for the government. So at this stage, if there are any preliminary cost savings for having this consolidation of procurement, that would be of help to this Member here.
The only other comment I have with respect to how the year went, from an MLA’s perspective, as an MLA, of course, if things go astray or off the rails, we are probably one of the first people who get notified as to if there are other issues. One of the common comments that I got from a number of different companies was that they were quite unsure what happened in this last year. We tried to consult with a lot of our stakeholders. Some of the arrangements in the past were that some of the businesses were given a heads-up for RFPs and stuff like that, and during this year some of that did not transpire. Of course, we as a government put our ads out in the paper and everything else. But some of the processes that a lot of the companies had in place, they were given a heads-up that an RFP was coming, “keep your eyes open for it” and everything else. So we may have upset a few businesses out there that may have had a traditional heads-up that RFPs were coming their way. I am assuming it was lessons learned in a lot of cases, that they are going to tune in more as to how we are going to be opening up procurement. But it was an observation that I had to share at this juncture with the department here.
Occupational health and safety has always been a huge part of what I do here to make sure this government has a strong safety culture. Whether we want to answer in general comments or not, I will bring it up in the directorate again, is what strides have we taken to augment our Health and Safety Program, moving it to the next level, which I know there has been a desire to do so from department to department? But quite frankly, Mr. Chair, we know full well that we have had some issues in some of these areas and they end up in the court system, and the courts have been dictating themselves where we are as a government with respect to our safety and safety culture. So, again, any update as to what our progress has been in the last year on occupation health and safety would be appreciated.
With the new energy functions coming up here, and I have spoken in the House under the term of fuel services, which is the old petroleum products division, and I do applaud the department for recently announcing the decreases in fuel in our communities, eight to nine cents respectively. I think that is a marketable goal and attainable success, and I do want to applaud the department for doing that. My question is the transparency around that. How do you come up with those calculations, and how are those calculations derived? More importantly, how transparent is it to
the public and Members on how those changes come about and when the changes are the other way, when we start seeing increase? How does this new fuel service division, how will they be communicating with Members of the Legislature as well as members of the public?
We know that there has also been a recent RFP that was issued for the complete replacement of our phone systems. Again, we can talk more in detail when we get to the TSC function. I have been reading anecdotal reports in media that there were going to be significant savings for us to do this, and I have heard things in the media that up to $6 million in savings over 10 years, which I thought was a bit on the high end. But maybe I could get some clarity as to what are the perceived savings in replacing our government phone systems in the long course.
You know, Mr. Chair, for lack of better words, these are just some of my opening observations with the department, and of course, if I don’t get enough reply in general comments I will definitely be posing them in detail. Thank you.