Thank you, Mr. Chair. I hope I understood correctly whether or not fiscal -- the attempt to have a fiscal strategy that is premised on balance is moot, if we get a borrowing limit increase. If that's so, Mr. Chair, I would say no. The fiscal strategy is really how we propose to manage the available revenues of government over the course of the four years balanced against projected expenses over the four years. And, Mr. Chair, it's certainly been -- you know, we can look back over the course of 20 years and see that sort of slow steady growth of the debt and its little spikes and then, you know, resulting increase to the debt limit. What we are seeing right now, and projected for the life of this government, is that that debt growth does seem to flatten out and that if we get an increase to the debt limit, while that gives us flexibility, flattening out the increase on debt means that we are not then putting, you know, $60 million towards servicing that debt.

We do have some long-term debt built in. The Deh Cho Bridge, for instance, is a big one, and it -- you know, we have a bridge that is contributing significantly to the transportation sector in the Northwest Territories. When the debt was taken on, it was tied to CPI. For a long time, it was low. These last few years, it has not been low. And so we have been paying more there.

All of which is to say, Mr. Chair, that we want to continue to provide all of the services and programs that we have. We want to be doing that from within an envelope of revenues that is fairly predictable. If we look at TFF and if you consider that our own source revenues are not very predictable and not very great in terms of how much we get, we want to provide those services over the long-term to do it with what we have and to do that in a long-term, sustainable way, which is what the Restoring Balance fiscal strategy is premised on. The borrowing limit increase gives us flexibility for the last couple of years, we think have an operating surplus, and then some crisis or another befalls us, and we want to ensure that we have that flexibility built in. I'll stop there, Mr. Chair. I'm conscious of time. Thanks.