Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to reserve my comments for last, as the mover of the motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t believe still that I have gotten the confirmation and clarification on what the net return is to our government at 14 percent. I understand, and I have heard this many times, that there are all sorts of factors that go into this and there is never any certainty on the forecast and the assumptions that the government makes to crunch out numbers. We are just fed like lap dogs, whatever they tell us at any given time is what we get.

Limiting the calculations to the assumptions the government made in drafting this paragraph, I am going to narrow it down to this...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to offer some general comments. I can understand, and I appreciate this debate that we are having and I am listening to what the Members are saying. I am a returning Member, but I think from my experience of having sat through four budgets, and argued the points here for the last four years, if it has taught me anything it is that I cannot accept all of the information that the government feeds us at face value. I don’t mean to imply that the Ministers somehow hide their information or anything like that, it is just the fact that our consensus system of...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to raise this point. If you look at the budget that we just passed for RWED, there were 489 PYs and we know there has to be some vacancies there, five or 10 percent, which could be up to 40 people. I can’t believe that the department with an $89 million budget and 489 PYs has to get a supp to fund $65,000. Why could they not fund this from within? Is this a case of just allocating the budget to just clear the books from their money from within?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to bring the Minister back to the issue at hand. It's good for the Minister to say I support this, I support that, I support this, but I tell you the people out there expect the Ministers to walk the talk and not just say I support the policy except in this case, without any justification. So I have a very specific question to the Minister. As a Minister responsible for this policy and Minister responsible for job creation, economy and economic development and spin-off benefits, would the Minister support giving maximum opportunity to local businesses and...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Could I get some more information on why the Housing Corporation is buying this house and what they are planning to do with this house? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to ask further questions on the BIP and the waiving of BIP by Cabinet. This time, I would like to ask the questions to the Minister of RWED, the lead Minister, the Minister responsible for this policy. Mr. Speaker, I believe the Minister is well aware of the fact that government has spent a lot of money and concentrated efforts on developing, maintaining and operating this BIP. There is a lot of history to that, there's a lot of justification for this policy, and also RWED is the lead department in promoting, working with and sometimes using a lot of...

I believe in the briefings that the Minister provided, out of the multi-millions that the federal government was allocating, we would be entitled to about $500,000 of that. My final question is on this immunization program. They are not always scheduled. I do believe that the meningitis question came about because this was going around and there were opportunities for youth and teenagers to be getting together and the Minister felt that it was prudent to immunize them against meningitis. My question is, is there a scheduled and predictable immunization campaign that is going to happen next...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think the Minister mentioned there are lots of businesses that have picked up the tenders, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that as many businesses are going to be able to actually meet the bidding requirements and have them back on April 2nd, because my understanding is the notice for this sort of project for these houses was so short and it was only for three weeks. Mr. Speaker, I’d also like to still know when he’s prepared to give us the background information on which the Cabinet decided to waive the BIP. We still don’t have that, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t know if I can ask any questions on that because I am assuming that litigation is before the courts.