Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do have witnesses.

There’s not a whole bunch of reasons why we’re not paying. It’s documentation, it’s the agreement that we had between another government and ourselves. So I can only answer this in one way, that this money that we got from another government was not there to pay for this work. It was there to cover the deficiencies. We still had deficiencies on the bridge. We have approximately the same amount of money left in the fund that there are deficiencies on the bridge. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank the Member as well.

As I indicated in one of the responses, I don’t have the list of individuals that were paid out or the circumstances surrounding the payout. What I’m dealing with is the payout of a company, Rowe’s Construction, at this point. What we’re indicating is that we have the money to finish the bridge, clean up all the deficiencies. If we’re going to pay over and above that, if we’re going to pay for a deal that somebody made with another company that went bankrupt on the job, then we’d have to come back to the House for more money. It’s that simple. We can’t take money out of there and then pay...

We proposed, in the bill, suspensions because suspension and demerits go well together. In the bill, a specific offence on distracted driving will net you a suspension plus demerit points. If an individual does have a fifth distracted driving charge in a two-year period, they will be suspended indefinitely. I think they would use all their demerit points. What I can do is maybe ask Russell or Steve to add to this.

This government supports lots of local and northern businesses. This is an issue where we need to have the proper documentation and we need to have the legal grounds to pay out of what is not considered to be exactly the reason that we got money. We weren’t given the mandate to just spend the money wherever we felt, wherever we felt pressure, wherever we felt that individuals were coming and trying to present this from a political perspective. We have a referee’s report, number one, and number two, the referee’s report said two of those had technical merit, that they felt that two of those...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The department is proposing to define use, so use would be holding, operating or touching a restricted electronic device.

No. Not in this forum.

There are three demerits for each violation. Three demerit points and after two years, within the two-year period, if there are no additional demerits then it would come off the books.

As much as I’ve answered, we are still continuing to work with the company and also with the Government of New Brunswick. As I indicated, Rowe’s has a claim. Two of the five claims add up to approximately what’s left in the budget, and it also adds up to approximately how much deficiencies will cost to complete all of the deficiencies. We would like to have had enough money to pay everyone. Go to New Brunswick. If they had the documentation that we felt that that government would support, then we would have paid it, filed it with the government and had confidence that the money would have been...