Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, you know, I have heard the Minister say this before but it's really disappointing that it took four years, or at least two, in order to have a couple line items put into the contractor's reporting regarding things like per diems, which I raised with her numerous times, and brought up in Cabinet when I first got in.
I ordered a procurement review to the Department of Infrastructure in the spring of 2020. We are now sitting at the fall of 2023, and a lot of the things that I directed them to do have not come forward and are taking four years to do.
In order to have a reporting sheet, which the federal government has been doing on this type of thing for decades now, it has taken this government four years to develop that. And I can tell them right now that their contractors still keeps the incidental piece of the per diems from their northern workers. So I don't have a lot of faith in this enforcement that's been going on or been put forward. It took way too long to come forward, and I don't think there's any teeth in it. When members or people can move to a community, rent a residential address, label that as their office address and become local to take away contracts from others in that region and therefore then be able to actually establish a business location in that town -- and I'm talking about your own town, Madam Chair, you know, they're very much gaming the system. So I really hope that the next Assembly takes this to heart because a lot of our money is going to the south and to people that have worked for this government before and are sitting with cozy pensions and are also still now taking money away from people here. Thank you, Madam Chair.