Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. I've long had issues with the formatting of the way we present the capital estimates, largely because it's an accounting document, but I -- you know, I think you could go to any single municipality and see how they do their capital planning. They essentially have a get chart that shows you what year a project will start, what year it will finish, the total cost of that project, and you can kind of look through time what's planned weekly. We do not provide the total costs of projects in our capital estimates. We believe that that it will affect procurement. I don't buy that argument. And we seem quite bad at getting fair value for dollar on a lot of our contracts and committing them on time. You know, I could go through, as I've done in years past, almost every single project and ask the same three questions: How much is this total project going to cost? How much federal money did we get from it? How is it being tendered? You know, basic questions. But I really don't think I should have to answer those questions. I think that that should be presented with the capital estimates.
I've been promised for years now some sort of dashboard. I don't quite know what's going to be in the dashboard but I'm told that it will track projects as they progress and hopefully will track overages and change orders and delays and perhaps even some reasoning. But I remain cautiously optimistic that one day we will have a dashboard.
I guess to reiterate what I said in my statement today, really, I think the perfect example of this is the Taltson hydro expansion. The government is asking for an undisclosed amount. They won't tell us how much publicly they're asking for the Taltson hydro expansion in this document, and yet they won't tell us how much the project costs. I just can't understand any reason I can't have a general estimate of what that project costs. Is it a billion? Is it $2 billion? That is all I want to know so I can have a coherent conversation about it.
Absence some -- like, this is our last kick at the can but I just can't see myself supporting these capital estimates absent some progress being made on either that dashboard, on the costs of projects, on getting a copy of that Taltson business case, on just any sort of recognition that the way we are doing this is lacking in transparency. Thank you, Madam Chair.