Michael Miltenberger

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That cap has been removed.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following three documents, entitled “Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 5, 2014-2015;” “Supplementary Estimates (Operations Expenditures) No. 3, 2014-2015;” and “Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 1, 2015-2016.” Thank you.

I would be happy to concur with the Member that he is a fountain of good ideas. We are 270 days left until the next election. We have our to-do lists, work lists that are fully subscribed to. We are working to implement all those plus some others that have been added on over the course of the last year or so.

The Member raises a very legitimate, good issue. The issue of putting a fee, a recovery fee on each barrel is there. It’s a question of the resources and the time. We have an Environment Fund that is being used and managed carefully to do all the things that currently are in place. To...

Thousands, Mr. Speaker, and they would be invariably in areas where there were old abandoned sites either for exploration or some type of small mining venture from the days of yore, but a lot of it tied to exploration sites.

That program is handled through the Power Corporation, and they’ve been taking care of the communications. If there are specific concerns from the Member, then I would be happy to talk to them about what may be needed to be done extra to ensure that those concerns could be addressed.

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.

T...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The short-term borrowing is a borrowing that takes place over the course of one year. Long-term borrowing is borrowing that has a much longer time frame than that.

Mr. Speaker, I seek consent to proceed with third reading of Bill 43, An Act to Amend the Borrowing Authorization Act. Thank you.

---Consent granted

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...

Yes, Madam Chair.