Pursuant to Standing Order 68, Paul Davis, MHA for Topsail, replaces Ray Hunter, MHA for Grand Falls-Windsor-Green Bay South.

The Committee met at 9:15.a.m. in the House of Assembly.

CHAIR (Harding): Good morning, everyone.

We have connected, it seems like. I would like to take the opportunity to welcome you all to our first Resource Committee meeting in which we will be debating the Estimates for the Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development, the Newfoundland and Labrador Research & Development Corporation, and the Rural Secretariat.

We will begin by the Committee members introducing themselves. After that, the observers may introduce themselves.

So we will begin.

MR. VERGE: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Wade Verge, Member for Lewisporte district.

MR. DALLEY: Derrick Dalley, Member for The Isles of Notre Dame.

MR. BAKER: Jim Baker, MHA for Labrador West.

MR. DAVIS: Paul Davis, Member for Topsail district.

MS MICHAEL: Lorraine Michael, Member for Signal Hill-Quidi Vidi.

MR. DEAN: Marshall Dean, Member for The Straits & White Bay North.

CHAIR: If we could have the names of the observers now.

MR. MORGAN: My name is Ivan Morgan, Researcher with the NDP caucus.

MR. LONO: Simon Lono, Researcher with the Office of the Official Opposition.

MR. WOODMAN: Ron Woodman, Legislative Assistant with the NDP office.

MR. POLLARD: Kevin Pollard, MHA for Baie Verte-Springdale, observer.

CHAIR: Thank you very much.

We will begin the debate after the Clerk calls the first subhead. At that time, I will recognize the minister who may take up to fifteen minutes to introduce the officials in his department and agencies and then sort of give an overview of his department's Estimates for this year.

Following that, the first speaker will have fifteen minutes, or up to fifteen minutes, and then we will alternate back and forth as the need arises. Everyone should have ample time to ask whatever questions they want.

I will ask the Clerk now to call the first subhead.

CLERK: 1.1.01.

CHAIR: 1.1.01. Shall that carry?

Minister.

MR. SKINNER: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

My name is Shawn Skinner, Minister of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development. I have a number of officials here with me this morning. I will, in a second, ask them to introduce themselves, but it is my understanding, in consultation with the members opposite, that we will start with the Rural Secretariat, then do the Research & Development Corporation, and then do the departmental Estimates.

After we introduce ourselves, I will say very brief comments about the Rural Secretariat, then I will turn it back over to members opposite who may wish to ask about the Estimates for the Rural Secretariat.

So I will ask staff, starting with my deputy to the left, to introduce themselves, please.

MR. MEADE: Brent Meade, Deputy Minister, Innovation, Trade and Rural Development.

MS MALONE: Rita Malone, Assistant Deputy Minister, Regional Economic Development.

MR. McCARTHY: Phil McCarthy, Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Industries and Business Development.

MR. HUDSON: Geoff Hudson, Chief Financial Officer, Research & Development Corporation.

MS QUINLAN: Krista Quinlan, Research & Development Corporation, Executive for Corporate Development.

MR. CARTER: Ken Carter, Director of Partnership, Research and Analysis with the Rural Secretariat.

MR. GILBERT: Bruce Gilbert, Assistant Deputy Minister, Rural Secretariat.

MS VAUGHAN: Linda Vaughan, Director of Financial and General Operations in Executive Council.

MS HOOPER: Diane Hooper, Executive Director for Ireland Business Partnerships.

MR. BARFOOT: Scott Barfoot, Director of Communications, Innovation, Trade and Rural Development.

MR. JONES: Scott Jones, Director of Financial Operations, Innovation, Trade and Rural Development.

MR. MORRIS: Paul Morris, Assistant Deputy Minister (Acting), Innovation Branch.

MS HEARN: Judith Hearn, Assistant Deputy Minister, Trade and Export Development.

MR. SKINNER: Thank you very much.

I will just speak to the Rural Secretariat very briefly, as I indicated, and then turn it over to members opposite for any questions they may have, and we will do our best to try and answer them.

For this year, the Rural Secretariat has been allocated a budget of $1.77 million for fiscal year 2010-2011. The Rural Secretariat supports nine citizen-based regional councils, and one stakeholder and/or interest-based provincial council. There are ten regional offices, each staffed with a regional planner. The Secretariat also employs six provincial office staff based here in Confederation Building.

With that, Mr. Chair, I will conclude my remarks and turn it over to members opposite.

CHAIR: Thank you, Minister, I just want to make the point that before any of the departmental officials respond, it is important that you give your name because it is being recorded for Hansard down in the Media Centre.

For the benefit of the members who may not know, Rural Secretariat Estimates, you will find them on page 21 in the Budget.

So, who is going to begin?

Mr. Dean.

MR. DEAN: Yes, thank you.

The first question I would like to ask: Is the Rural Secretariat still under the Executive Council? I am just wondering why it would not be under INTRD instead of the Executive Council, any particular reason?

MR. SKINNER: I do not have a definitive reason why it is not under INTRD, Mr. Dean, other than to say that it is my understanding that initially the Rural Secretariat was created under the Executive Council office. We were delegated responsibility and authority for it. The assistant deputy minister in the department reports to – his deputy minister would be the Clerk of the Executive Council, and as well, reports in to me. That is the administrative structure that has been outlined, and that is the one that we have been following.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

I know I was involved in it when it was set up, I believe. I am not sure how many years ago that was now, probably six or seven years. Is it that long that it started?

Can you give us an example of the role of the Rural Secretariat and how it is working, especially at the regional level and throughout the Province?

MR. SKINNER: Sure. The example I will use, I guess, will be one from your own district in terms of the regional pilot project that we are using, which I am sure you are familiar with. We have constituted a pilot project on the Northern Peninsula where we have interested community-based stakeholders sitting on our regional council. They are providing advice and advice documents to government based upon consultations that they have within their region.

We have engaged, initially, a number of departments to try to work in with the regional councils to impact government policy-making. Those departments are: Innovation, Trade and Rural Development; Municipal Affairs; Tourism, Culture and Recreation; and Transportation - that is the fourth one, which is the one I could not think of.

I will ask maybe Mr. Gilbert to give you a little bit more detail, but we have had a number of meetings with the departmental officials and with the regional pilot members on the Northern Peninsula to look at some of the policy decisions that government is making relative to how we expend funds in that area. We have gone up and presented to them how we think things should unfold in terms of roadwork, for instance, we will talk about the roads that we have prioritized within the Department of Transportation and Works. We will share that with the pilot group and we will ask for their input as to what they feel about the priorities that have been established by the department.

That has occurred with, I believe, all the departments to date and we have received feedback. In some cases there have been some changes made to the list and in some cases there have not been. It has been done really based upon a collaborative approach. It is a way, we believe, of engaging the citizenship into the governance of the area and the region in which they live.

That on a high level is what we have been doing. If I could take a minute just maybe to ask Mr. Gilbert who has been involved much more directly than I have to give you a little bit more on that. That might help explain what it is that I have been talking about.

MR. GILBERT: Sure. Thank you.

The regional collaboration pilot on the Northern Peninsula, in our Rural Secretariat shop, we consider that one of our special initiatives. We have a host of other things we do too, but the best way to describe it I think - and the minister done an excellent job - is it is a pilot, it is an experiment and it actually is pushing the envelope on exploring possible regional collaborative governance models.

So, it is a true partnership. Government did not have all the I's dotted and T's crossed in terms of the model when it went into the room full of stakeholders and it was a negotiation with regional stakeholders: How can we best get the ideas, views, opinions, advice from the region into policy and decision making? It is only one year old, so it is new. In that year there have been four deputies on the ground at meetings in Plum Point or other venues in the region. There have been six or seven or eight assistant deputy ministers, numerous directors.

What we have done is we have managed to bring high level officials to the table to explain how decisions are made now inside the edifice called government and asking citizens and stakeholders, collectively, to think regionally and to try to help the government make better decisions. We have had input submitted to all four participating departments to date, and it is a work in progress.

MR. DEAN: Okay. Thank you.

In terms of input, I guess, at the Cabinet decision level in particular, does the Rural Secretariat have involvement there or is it involved in, I guess not every Cabinet decision obviously, but kind of percentage-wise, or how much involvement is there in this feedback - how much does it affect, I guess, the decisions of Cabinet?

MR. SKINNER: Well, ideally the Rural Secretariat will have commentary on all papers that come before Cabinet. We try to ensure that any departments that are bringing forward Cabinet papers that the Rural Secretariat is given an opportunity to review those and to provide what we refer to as the rural lens to that paper.

It is an information process in terms of providing further information to Cabinet. So, in terms of how much impact it has on Cabinet decision making, if I were to use those words, it really is dependent upon how Cabinet views the information that is being presented to it, but we try, as a Rural Secretariat, to make sure that we provide as much information as possible on the papers that are going forward so that Cabinet has a full spectrum of information available to it when it makes its decisions.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

I am thinking of a decision that was recently made, obviously, in our district, minister. I think the Rural Secretariat and the idea of regional collaboration is a great idea and the rural lens and so on. I do not see that it had any input or involvement at all in this recent decision on the air ambulance movement out of the district. So, I guess I will just ask the question: Was there any collaboration; was there any participation in the study, in the exercise kind of thing, from the Rural Secretariat level?

MR. SKINNER: To my knowledge, the Rural Secretariat was not aware of or commented upon the decision related to the air ambulance study, but for certainty I will refer to Mr. Gilbert and just ask if he could answer that as well.

MR. DEAN: Thank you.

MR. GILBERT: Thank you.

Just to set the stage here, we need to separate the Rural Secretariat and what it does, ergo the staff, the officials and the regional councils of the Rural Secretariat which are the volunteers that sit on these councils, one of which is in MHA Dean's area. Each does something different. The rural lens, each department is required within its own rules to complete a rural lens and the Rural Secretariat's job is to review the paper and answer the question: Did the department do an adequate job of completing the rural lens? It is almost like a bit of a traffic cop, if you will, but we do not see all papers. There are all kinds of papers that do not come to us. It does not mean they did not do a rural lens. There are exemptions; there are regular legislative papers that we do not see. We did not see a paper dealing with the air ambulance decision from the bureaucracy side, from the official side.

From the regional council side, the general premise of the regional councils - there are nine of them and a provincial council - is to send in advice and ideas into government. No list; anything they want to send in they can send in. No one from the regional council area of the Northern Peninsula submitted anything on the air ambulance issue. To my knowledge, they were not directly asked about that issue either, but that is not to say that all councils are asked about every decision because that would be impossible for Cabinet to deal with every council on every issue.

The regional council input, or advice giving process, supplements all the other data sources that Cabinet would have, and when Cabinet feels it has enough information to make decisions it does so. In this case, I know that the regional council was not engaged in this particular decision.

MR. DEAN: Okay. Thank you.

Does the Rural Secretariat have a role in the approving of funding in rural development projects?

MR. SKINNER: Does it have a role in approving funding for rural development projects?

MR.DEAN: Yes.

MR. SKINNER: No. The Rural Secretariat does not, that would be - when you say rural development projects, I am assuming you are meaning things like the RSDF fund that would come through the department?

MR. DEAN: Yes.

MR. SKINNER: In terms of approving, they may have commentary on a project that might be submitted in terms of saying here would be the economic benefits of that project et cetera, et cetera, but again, it would be information. That would be their role, but in terms of decision making I would have to say no.

MR. DEAN: Okay, yes. So you are just providing information, basically.

MR. SKINNER: Yes.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

Does the Rural Secretariat have a monitoring role to kind of measure the effects of government policies in rural Newfoundland?

MR. SKINNER: My answer to that would be that the measurement of the effectiveness of policies is something that I think we are striving to get to. We want to be able to do that kind of activity. I would suggest to you today that we are not there. I would suggest to you that it may be ad hoc, it may be more commentary based than it would be quantifiable or qualitative based. It is something I think we would like to see, but no, I do not think we are there yet. We have talked within the department and within the Rural Secretariat about evaluation frameworks, measurements and the kinds of things we would measure to determine effectiveness, but that is a work in progress right now, Mr. Dean. It is not something that we have finalized by any stretch of the imagination. We are very early in that process but it something we feel we need to get to.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

Just an observation and you can comment on it or whatever. I do not know if the Rural Secretariat is very well known out at ground level so to speak, or whatever. Do you have a comment on that as to whether that is where it needs to be or is there a way to make it more, I guess, visible to the general populous or whatever?

MR. SKINNER: Your comment is well taken. I would share that with you to a certain extent. I would say to you that in the eighteen months or so that I have been minister of this department I think the awareness level of the Rural Secretariat has increased or has gotten better, but I would certainly say to you that it entered, when it was created, a very crowded space. There were RED Boards, there were economic development groups, and there were chambers of commerce. There were a whole bunch of people occupying an economic development space that the Rural Secretariat itself entered into. So, I guess it had to sort of fight for its own little piece of turf out there. There was some concern about was it going to maybe dislodge or take the place of, or replace some of those entities that I mentioned. There was some concern around that.

I think, from my perspective, that we have helped people understand what we see the role of the Rural Secretariat as being, and it is working with all of those groups. It is trying to make people more conscious of regional development, regional services and regional priorities, and thinking the regional think so to speak. I think that we have gotten better at promoting it but we need to do it a bit better and we need to restructure it a little bit in terms of – I will refer to the council – some of the membership on the councils. We have had some people who have really hung in there and we have had some people who have dropped off. We are currently looking at replacing some people. We would like to see more youth engaged and that kind of thing.

From my perspective, I would share your commentary that it may not be as well-known but we are trying to do better at that. Again, if I could, I would ask Mr. Gilbert - because we have had many conversations about this – if you are okay with it, if he could add some commentary as well.

MR. DEAN: Yes. Sure.

MR. GILBERT: Thank you.

Yes, indeed, we are trying to become well-known, better known but known for something and not just known for being there. What we have done over the last year - now some of you may recall, in last year's Estimates we talked about embarking on a new suite of activities because we finally had some supplementary resources to do some work on the ground, and we have done a lot.

Our basic approach has been let's become known for being an entity that does good work on the ground rather than just promote ourselves, we will do that, too. We have endless examples, too many to give you here today, but we have examples in all regions now of the Rural Secretariat staff working on fresh new projects. These are not economic development projects; they are collaborative initiatives doing community-based research, engaging citizens on important policy questions and issues, forums. We are out there, we are doing things. We need to do more.

One of our challenges has been not so much becoming known, it has been to become unknown for the things that people assumed we were. There was a lot of confusion about what we were. Even today, we get blamed on Open Line for things that have nothing to do with us because people are confusing us with INTRD. They are confusing the councils with the staff. So we have some sorting out to do and we have made some headway but there is more work to be done.

I am pleased to tell you that I think that the work of the staff – the staff are operating with more vigour and passion than they have ever worked with before because they have real things on the ground to do now. It has been a positive year.

MR. DEAN: I had an inquiry just probably a week or so ago from one of my constituents who had expressed an interest in being involved in the Rural Secretariat. Can you tell me how a person gets involved? Are they appointed? Do they apply? What is the process?

MR. SKINNER: I will let Mr. Gilbert tell you that. I have a general idea but I just want to make sure he gives you all the details.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

MR. GILBERT: The regional councils and the provincial councils, as I understand it, are category three appointed boards. So, at the end of the day, it is Cabinet that determines who will actually sit on these councils. There have been numerous approaches. In the very early days there was a call for people interested through newspaper ads and people sent in their names.

I think two or three years in, before my time, just before I arrived, they asked council members to submit names but they were not the only names submitted. MHAs were asked for names. Basically, there is a constant never-ending process of collecting names of people who could sit on these councils. Now people move away, people get tired, people drop off, people do not attend even though they are still - so there is natural transition or attrition on these boards. Over time - you could almost imagine it is like a community council. Over time, eventually everybody will probably be on one of these councils.

Currently, the process we are working on now is that names are being brought in and whenever we have names of possible people to be considered for a council seat we pass them through to the minister who then puts them into the system for appointed boards. When that process plays out, as it will, new members are appointed.

MR. DEAN: What is the term of that appointment?

MR. GILBERT: They have been two years, initially, but then because - in the early days, all of a sudden you would have entire councils running out of time at two years, so they extended them. Typically what happens is that there is a two-year term and then there is an extension offered. That is, if I could say, that is sort of the tradition that has unfolded in a short period of time. So, some of them have been there four or five years.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

Just one last question about the budget and little if any change to it: Is there any particular reason, just kind of where it is at?

MR. SKINNER: Your question is, because of no change?

MR. DEAN: Yes.

MR. SKINNER: Okay. Well, last year we had an extra $100,000 that was given to the Rural Secretariat for some of the work that Mr. Gilbert referred to, that was being done on the ground and we felt that was good work that was done. We continued that again this year. The rest of the money, basically, is just status quo in terms of following on with what we have done. We felt that the Rural Secretariat had sort of found its legs a little bit last year and was starting to do some good work, and we wanted to give it another year to continue to do that. There was no particular request or need identified for any increase or decrease in funding. We just wanted to make sure that the money we had for the councils to do that bit of work on the ground was still there and we ensured that they had that.

MR. DEAN: Yes. So, it has kind of developed to where we want it to be, I guess, or expect it to be sort of thing?

MR. SKINNER: At this point; although I will say to you, it is still a review process in terms of myself and Mr. Gilbert in particular, looking at some of the work that is being done and trying to find better ways of doing it; meeting with our regional planners to make sure that we understand their needs, they understand where we think the Rural Secretariat should be going. So, I would not want to give you the impression that it is just status quo in terms of nothing happening. It is status quo in the sense that we felt we got to a place last year that we were happy with and we wanted to make sure that we at least started from there, and we will see where it goes this year.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

Thank you.

MR. SKINNER: Thank you.

CHAIR: Thank you, Mr. Dean.

Ms Michael.

MS MICHAEL: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I guess I am going to be continuing with the same types of questions but trying to get greater clarification.

When Mr. Gilbert talked about the work that you did start this year on the ground, I sort of referred back to some of the practical things that he mentioned last year in Estimates with regard to hoping to do regional forums, to have dialogue sessions with shareholders groups, citizens throughout this region, that kind of thing. Is that the kind of thing you are talking about and can you give us an idea of the breadth of the meetings you were able to have?

MR. SKINNER: The short answer, Ms Michael, is yes. In terms of some of the detail, I will just refer to Mr. Gilbert and let him give you that directly, if you are okay with that.

MS MICHAEL: Yes, I am.

MR. GILBERT: I will try and be shorter than I was last year. I have been getting some ribbing about that.

The first thing we did with that last year, once we received this modest infusion, but appropriate infusion of resources, was to challenge all of our staff in each region to come up with one community-based research project, for example, bring partners together to explore collaboratively at least one research question related to rural sustainability that you feel needs some regional level data. They all did that, and some are on their second and third projects. For every region we have at least nine or ten community-based research projects.

They were also challenged to adopt, or push, or cede, or convene, if you will, one collaboration brokering challenge. In other words, where are there people, groups, entities, stakeholders, that could be working more effectively together and are not, where could you intervene? Can you adopt that as some sort of an informal project? They all did. We have nine of those.

We also challenged each of our staff to adopt one citizen engagement initiative. Push the envelope, use different techniques, approaches, beyond meetings. Use forums - some of them are using electronic voting in meetings with these electronic voting keypads. Try and push the envelope to try and capture the voices of citizens on particular policy issues that could inform advice.

So, you can see that there are about thirty things happening now. What is interesting about that $100,000 is that many of the things that got initiated, because we all of a sudden realized we had a few dollars to work with, did not cost any money at all. Other partners bellied up to the bar with their own resources. So we managed to leverage all kinds of activity because of the premise that we now have some resources to work with, which has been quite amazing. I would suspect we have well over $100,000 worth of projects.

A couple of examples; the people on the Cape Shore felt that the various communities and stakeholders on the Cape Shore where not communicating very well. We worked with them to design a collaborative community radio project. So for a week on the Cape Shore all the communities came together, the RED boards were there, the college was there, the towns were there, the mayors were there, and we had a week's dialogue on the radio, mixed in with culture and song and dance, whatever, discussing the future of the Cape Shore and how people should work more effectively together. There is an example of a nano project.

From a community-based research project, there are a whole host of things happening. Just last weekend my colleague, Ken Carter, was in Central - I believe Gander - where they were presenting the results of the research initiative looking at: Why have so many strategic planning exercises begat so little? There have been seven or eight strategic planning exercises convened or paid for by various government departments over the years, federal, provincial, municipal, and yet they are all sitting on shelves. Why is that? They studied that. They went in there and they looked at that and they came up with some very interesting findings. Collaborative again, ACOA was in the room, provincial people were in the room. So, trying to get a handle on local issues through some research, there is an example.

From a citizen engagement point of view, I will give you one example. Recently, we brought together all nine of our councils - representatives of, those willing - on a live Web cast video conference polling experiment where we polled - we basically deliberated through nine sites across the Province where everybody was voting on various, or agreeing or disagreeing on various themes to try and gauge the pulse of what do all of these super volunteers actually think about the particular issue of the day? The issue we were working on was: What is the role of the citizen in government policy? So, we talked about that.

We have lots of experiments going on. Our staff are being trained. I suspect that our staff now are the most highly trained, perhaps anywhere in the country, and soon will be accredited as partnership brokers. We have engaged a firm in the UK to help us with that. We have been to Washington, D.C. and worked with America Speaks to try and glean from them the most cutting edge citizen engagement tools and technologies that we can find. So, with a small amount of resources, lots of examples – again, most people are wondering why we are not bringing money to start development projects, but that is the cross we have to bear. People confuse us with other departments. They do not fully understand the citizen engagement role or the collaboration brokering role, but we are working in that environment regardless.

MS MICHAEL: Thank you.

I think I can understand their confusion. I guess what I would like to know is, practically speaking, in terms of - because of the fact that you are responsible for promoting sustainable development, both economically and socially, how does the information that you are gathering through the research projects go out into the broader area? I know that there is a different role for those under the business and economic development services, however, you do have, the department, INTRD – and you are not the department, I understand that – does have forty-eight economic development officers out there, I understand. According to the Estimates, the salaries, there are forty-eight economic development officers. How does the work that you are doing, and the information that you are gathering, impact the policies that are happening inside of INTRD and impact the direction in which the work of those economic officers goes?

MR. SKINNER: In terms of the information, that would be gathered by the Rural Secretariat. In terms of information that may be submitted by regional councils, those papers would come in. If they are, in fact, formal papers – and we do get formal papers - they would come into the Rural Secretariat office to Mr. Gilbert's office, and they would be distributed to any departments that are impacted or mentioned or referred to for review and commentary. There is a formal process in place that Mr. Gilbert's staff would track those advice documents, we would call them, and ensure that commentary and reply was given back.

So, people feed into government, make comments or give advice related to, it might be transportation issues, education issues, municipal affairs, whatever it may be, INTRD. Those documents would be distributed out to those departments so that they could read and comment upon them, effect any change that they may see within themselves that would need to be effected, and also responded to so that the people who submitted them were also given some response to understand that their commentary had been read and responded to.

Again, I will ask Mr. Gilbert if he might want to elaborate in more detail on that, but there is a process and there is a feedback mechanism that is in place. I will just ask Bruce to give you a little bit more detail on that.

MR. GILBERT: Okay, thank you.

That is exactly right. When councils submit advice documents, sometimes it is just a letter. It is not a big elaborate document. Sometimes it has taken a year and it is a fifty-page document. So, an advice document could be many things. When it comes into us or the minister, we immediately jump on it and track it and make sure that an appropriate response be given in a timely manner to the councils. That is tricky because some of the papers refer to seven or eight departments, or five or six departments, and it is advice that is coming to departments that they have not requested. They are like: What are we going to do with this? So, it is a bit of a challenge but it is working so far.

All departments have responded. Sometimes they send an ADM or a DM, or a director out to meet with the group that wrote the document to seek clarity. What we see happening is a bit of a relationship starts building and acrimony reduces. People start having intelligent discussions and it opens the door for other things. We have seen that with the talk about a community schools approach in the Clarenville area. There have been various people from education out there talking with the local people.

Now, sometimes over the last year - I may have mentioned it last year in Estimates, but departments are actually realizing that these councils are out there as a resource and that they could go to them with more specific department driven questions. When that happens, it is an easy answer: How does the advice get into the department? The department has gone looking for advice or input on a particular thing and they walk away with it. So we see that, almost the flipside. One is like council driven advice coming in and the other is departments going out looking for advice.

The challenge for us now, the third thing is: What are we going to do with the research products when we bring a group of people together, governments, non-profits, town councils? Well, in a way, it is not Rural Secretariat advice at that stage. We are convening a process to create new information, and it is owned by all the players in that room. So if the RED Boards are participating, they have the document. If INTRD is participating, they have the document. So, in a way, when we do those collaborate projects each player at the table is walking away with whatever they can take away from the process and infusing their own work, using it to – some people are using it to lobby government in other ways, other people are using it to change things inside.

There are, I guess, three distinct ways that advice is making a difference. Again, it is very difficult to separate cause and effect to prove that any advice document made a change. That would be a challenge in and of itself but we are trying to understand how our work is making a difference.

MS MICHAEL: Thank you.

I understand clearly what you are saying about the collaborative research projects and the ownership of the material. I am wondering though, Mr. Minister, if the results of those research projects would also be open? For example, if I wanted a copy of the results of one of the research projects, would that also be open to me to get? I think it would be very helpful to know what is coming into the Secretariat with regard to the research that is being done.

MR. SKINNER: Any of the advice documents that we refer to, as far as I am concerned, are public documents. So if any of those you would want, then I would have no difficulty in releasing those. As far as I am concerned, they are in the public domain anyway. They came from the public.

MS MICHAEL: Right.

MR. SKINNER: They may be synthesized or formatted or put together, but the basic premise and the basic information comes from the engagement we have had with the community stakeholders. So I would consider that to be available for one and all.

MS MICHAEL: Because of the fact that we obviously do not know when a research project is happening necessarily – if it is happening in a district where a party has an MHA, well then, obviously they are probably going to know, but where I am only one MHA and none of that is going to be going on necessarily in my district, but as leader of the party it is important information. I will not know what to ask to receive because I will not know something is happening. Could it be said, as a matter of practice, that when an advice document comes in that it automatically gets sent out, for example, to my office?

MR. SKINNER: I guess the undertaking I will take for you is that I will go back and look at the information streams that we have. The short answer would be yes; I will try and accommodate you on that. I would like to just check to see if we have, as a department, any obligations – is the word I will use - to some of the partners in terms of the information that we are receiving from them and what we are doing with that information.

Generally speaking, I will undertake to go back and work with Mr. Gilbert and his staff to see what we are able to provide in terms of getting that to you and when we can get it to you; whether we can give it to you right away, whether we would have to have sign-off from the parties affected. There may be some details, but generally speaking, I will try and accommodate that.

MS MICHAEL: Right. One of the reasons I bring it up is, in particular, not too long ago actually, I had a member of a council say to me that she was actually quite excited by the paper that they had come up with and wanted to know if I had seen it. I said: well, no, we do not receive them. She said: well, I really would like you to see this because I think there is really exciting stuff in it and I will get a copy to you. I am happy to take the copy from her but I think we do not need to do it that way. I think I should be able to receive it.

MR. SKINNER: I am generally in agreement with you on that. I think they are public documents; they are coming from a public process. As long as we have no legal obligations or any potential liabilities there, then I would be okay with that. We will review that issue and I will follow up with you on that.

MS MICHAEL: Okay, because it is important for all kinds of reasons to have the information. For example, when Mr. Gilbert talked about the project that they did up the Shore, I have to say that it brought back great memories of what some of us did back in 1982 on Bell Island. Then it was MUN extension, social action commission and rural development where we had four days of community television and did exactly the same thing that resulted in a lot of projects on Bell Island; the museum, for example, people starting B&B's, the bakery, everything.

As I have said a number of times publicly, we do not have to reinvent the wheel here. There are models out there. It is really good to know because practically speaking too, I do not want to be standing in the House and hammering the government negatively on something that I do not see them doing if you are starting to do things that are exactly what I am asking for.

MR. SKINNER: Yes, fair enough.

MS MICHAEL: Because, to put it bluntly, in my response to the Budget last week this is the kind of thing I am asking for. So, it is important for me to know if something is starting to happen.

MR. SKINNER: Yes, and we will try and accommodate on that.

MS MICHAEL: That will be really helpful.

I think maybe all of my questions then have been covered from Mr. Dean and myself.

Yes, thank you very much on the Rural Secretariat.

CHAIR: Okay, any further questions from the committee with respect to the Rural Secretariat?

Okay. I guess we will move now to the Resource and Development Corporation or –

MR. SKINNER: I understood that the members opposite might want to take a break.

MS MICHAEL: If I can just give a report, they are just starting to gather for the demonstration. I do not know if Mr. Marshall wants to stay. We have not received word to go out yet in other words.

CHAIR: Okay.

MR. SKINNER: Okay.

MR. DEAN: Sit here for a minute. There he is.

CHAIR: Okay.

We will vote on these Estimates now for the Rural Secretariat.

Shall 2.6.01 carry?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, subhead 2.6.01 carried.

CHAIR: Shall the total carry for the Rural Secretariat?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, Rural Secretariat, total heads, carried.

CHAIR: Shall I report the Estimates for the Rural Secretariat carried without amendment?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, Estimates for the Rural Secretariat carried without amendment.

CHAIR: We have moved now to the Research & Development Corporation. Minister Skinner, do you have a few comments to make on that at the beginning?

MR. SKINNER: Well, again, Mr. Chair, I do have staff here with me and I will basically defer to the members opposite. I have a statement that I could read into the record, but I am not going to take our time with that, in the interests of members opposite having maybe to take a little recess, I will leave as much time as possible for them to ask questions. So I will just immediately turn to members opposite.

CHAIR: Thank you, sir.

I just want to, for the record, Mr. Kelvin Parsons has arrived at the meeting now.

So who would like to begin the questioning on the Research & Development Corporation?

MR. DEAN: (Inaudible) for a little while, and that is not really what I had prepared to speak to, so is it possible for us to go to a different piece?

MR. SKINNER: Sure. That would be fine with us, yes.

MR. DEAN: Thank you.

MR. SKINNER: Whatever you want to start with, Kelvin, we will go with that.

CHAIR: Mr. Parsons.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Thank you.

I had agreed to sit in for Mr. Dean because there is a protest or whatever taking place with his constituents on the front steps. So, rather than delay things, I thought I would sit in for him until he got back, but it was not the R&D piece that I was prepared to ask questions about, it was another section if that is okay.

MR. SKINNER: No, that is fine.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: The first area I was going to look at was the Immigrant Investor Fund.

MR. SKINNER: Yes.

CHAIR: We are dealing with the Research & Development Corporation.

M. SKINNER: No. I think Mr. Parsons, if I could, has indicated that he wants to go to the Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development. You are not now questioning the Research & Development Corporation?

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: No.

MR. SKINNER: Mr. Chair, he indicated that he would rather move to the department first and ask some questions about the department, and now he is going to direct a question regarding the Immigrant Investor Fund within the department. We are prepared to entertain that.

CHAIR: Okay. Do you want to go right through the department then because I think -

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Yes, I just have a couple of areas actually that I was going to cover off while Mr. Dean was outside, then he was going to come back and resume wherever it was you people had left off.

CHAIR: Okay. Well if we want to do that, that is –

MR. SKINNER: I am okay with that, so if Mr. Parsons wants to start there, that is fine.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Whatever topics I discuss he, of course, will not be, I understand, regurgitating that. He will hopefully be satisfied with it.

CHAIR: Okay.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: My questions, Mr. Chairman, are related to –

MS MICHAEL: (Inaudible) section in the budget so that I can – not just the question, but the section in the budget, please.

MR. SKINNER: No, I do not think you will find it reflected in the budget, Ms Michael -

MS MICHAEL: Okay, good enough.

MR. SKINNER: - in terms of an actual line item.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: The Immigrant Investor Fund, as I understand it, is a fund that is overseen by your department –

MR. SKINNER: Correct.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: - but not necessarily a line item in your budget. I ask it in the context of the Auditor General's findings where he talked about the Newfoundland and Labrador Immigrant Investor Fund Limited, which was incorporated in April 2005. He addressed the fact that we have been getting these contributions from the federal government for some years and up to the time when he had filed his latest report that there were, in fact, no investments.

It was an investment fund from which no investments had ever been made and he raised some questions about if the existence and the purpose of the existence of this fund was to have money from the feds and so on, and contributors, that we could use for economic development purposes or whatever, how come it had not been used.

I am just wondering if the minister could direct some comments in that regard - more of a generic nature as opposed to throwing around dollars and cents. I am just more concerned about his comments as to why this fund has not been utilized since its inception.

MR. SKINNER: There are monies received, basically, on a monthly basis from the federal government passed on to the provinces for use through the Immigrant Investor Fund, and that fund has a number of parameters around which the projects that one may wish to do can be entertained.

We have brought forward a number of projects. Some of them did not fit the parameters and therefore were not eligible for it. Some of them that we brought forward, it was deemed by government that we had enough of our own funds, basically. We were in a position that it was less expensive for us to use our own funds to do that rather than using the funds of Immigrant Investor Fund which have to be paid back. Government has to pay those back over a period of time.

That fund, basically, there is a 7 per cent administration fee being used on it, so we have done an analysis in some cases of the Province either using money it has on hand or accessing money from banks and it has been deemed to be less expensive or more budgetary-wise, I guess, if I could use that term, to use the money we have on hand as opposed to dipping into the Immigrant Investor Fund.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: If this fund has existed since April 2005, surely, if there is a problem with eligibility requirements or criteria, or it is more, as you say, prudent to use bank funds as opposed to fund funds, why has something not been done about it? Why do we need five years to figure that out and get it changed?

MR. SKINNER: There have been discussions with the federal government. It is my understanding - and I may have to go to officials for some detail on this - that there are some changes either being proposed or may have already been enacted on the amounts on the fund. There have been discussions with the federal government on that.

I will look to Mr. McCarthy, if I could, to maybe just give us a little bit of detail on that, but there have been discussions around potential changes to the requirements of the fund.

MR. McCARTHY: One of the key points with respect to the fund is it has to be repaid to the federal government in five years. Really, this is only borrowed money. It has to be repaid to the federal government five years after you receive it. We have to start repaying money to the federal government in May of this year. So, anything you do or any projects you use it for, you have to bear that in mind.

There have been some discussions with the federal government. Newfoundland is not the only Province that has not utilized their money. Part of the problem is the repayment terms. There have been some discussions in the last couple of months with the federal government about ways and means of trying to help the provinces utilize the funds better.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: I understand that there was $176 million provided so far.

MR. McCARTHY: That is the ball park, yes.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Yes.

Can you give us a bit more detail? We are five years in. We decide that the program is not working for us for whatever reasons. Maybe you could tell us why it did not work? Why are we sitting on $176 million? We did not use it for any purpose whatsoever. We are going to pay more interest, for example, 7 per cent, versus what you were getting in a bank for your own interest. I believe the Auditor General said we would end up with a $5 million shortfall if you had to pay it back last November.

I am just wondering, you talk about prudency, if something is not working – were there any discussions with the feds to say: Look, albeit our good intentions, yours and ours, we are into a situation where we cannot use for whatever reasons, and I would like you to tell me the reasons why you have not been able to use it. Not only that, we are going to pay through the nose because we just have it sitting in a bank account.

MR. SKINNER: Number one; there are sufficient funds available in the fund to be able to meet the repayment terms. The Auditor General's comments were about a point in time, but in terms of the overall fund, it is my understanding that we have sufficient funds available to repay the monies that we have received. The fund has been earning interest for the last number of years – five years that we have had it -and there has been sufficient interest generated in that fund so that we will be able to meet the repayment terms. There was no deficit in the fund.

There have been projects that we looked at doing with the Immigrant Investor Fund, but as I said earlier it was deemed to be more feasible or more prudent, for a variety of reasons, for us to use our own facilities, our own monies that we had on hand, to be able to do that.

In terms of the discussions with the federal government, as I have indicated there have been discussions back and forth and there potentially will be changes made and more flexible terms offered to the provinces to be able to use those funds. Again, in terms of any specifics about it, I would refer to officials to provide more detail to you on that.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Have there been any discussions with the feds to say – 7 per cent might have been a reasonable figure back when you started the fund in 2005, but bank interest rates have been down 2 per cent or 2.5 per cent for some time. Albeit you might have enough money in the fund to repay the money that you have; that is true because you have not spent anything of what you have. If you have 179, you still have it in your bank account because you have not used it. That does not take away from the fact that the Auditor General, I believe, made a correct statement in saying: Notwithstanding the principle itself, which you got all of, you are going to end up in a net loss position if you do not do something on the interest rate piece because you simply have to pay back 7 per cent and you have not been making that on your investment.

My question is: Has there been any discussions between your department and the feds to say, look, the circumstances we thought existed did not exist, can we change that? So, at least the Province does not end up out of money, out-of-pocket. Everybody was well-intentioned here. Yes, we will give you back your money or else change the criteria so we can continue to go ahead and use it. How do you see it happening? Are we just going to give them back the money and say: Thank you, we have all fooled around now for five years and we have not been able to use it? There is 176 million bucks kicking around that hopefully we can use somewhere in our economy. What is the plan?

MR. SKINNER: The fact that the money is there does not necessarily mean that we have to use it. I do not see anything particularly wrong if we are not using it, as long as we have other available sources of funds to do the projects that we wish to do. To date, that has been the case. We have been able to provide sufficient funding for the projects we wanted to do from other sources. So that money is still there and at some point if we need it, it is there to be used. From my perspective, there is nothing wrong with not using it if we have other more prudent ways of providing the funding we need for the projects that we wish to do.

There have been discussions with the federal government. There are changes, either very shortly coming, if not already enacted - and I will look to officials to tell me about the timing of that. There have been discussions between the feds and the provinces and there are some changes. I would ask that the officials maybe give you some detail on that.

MR. McCARTHY: Phil McCarthy.

I am not sure about the timing because we are waiting for the federal government, but there have been discussions with the federal government about the 7 per cent. The 7 per cent is an administration fee charged by the federal government. There have been discussions between the provinces and the federal government about that level.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: About that level, you mean to reduce it, eliminate it?

MR. McCARTHY: To try to reduce it, yes.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: On the discussions regarding the criteria, could you give me some idea what was the problem with the criteria or the eligibility criteria such that you could not use the funding?

MR. McCARTHY: The biggest problem with the eligibility criteria is the five-year payback.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: How so? Explain it to me. I am not an accountant.

MR. McCARTHY: The money you get has to be repaid to the federal government within five years. So if you use that for a long-term project that goes past five years, the Province has to budget that out of its own money down the road. When the Province entered this - the same as all other provinces - the Minister of Finance had to sign a guarantee guaranteeing the federal government that the money would be repaid within five years. So, what we get this month we have to repay five years now down the road.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: I believe we actually changed or amended the Loan Guarantee Act here in the House to accommodate that back in May of last year, did we? That was tied in with the Investor Immigrant Fund.

MR. McCARTHY: It could be. That would be the Minister of Finance.

MR. SKINNER: I am not sure, Mr. Parsons. Off the top of my head, I am not sure.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: It just seems that there is an issue here. We have been taking money for five years from somebody, we have known for all that time that it is five-year money, therefore no good for long-term projects. We know that by keeping it in our banks we are losing, ultimately, because it costs us 7 per cent to have it, not using it and only getting 2 per cent or 3 per cent back in interest from chartered banks. Why have we been in that position? Why would you take it? Why did you not just say: Look, guys, this is a no-brainer? We are losing money with this program. Why do we not just say: Whoa, until we change the rules, we do not want your money?

MR. SKINNER: As a point of clarification – and I will ask the officials; I do not know if they have the exact dollar amounts there – we are not losing money. There are sufficient funds available in the Immigrant Investor Fund to pay back the monies that have been received by the Province. I do not know, Phil, if you have those numbers there in front of you?

MR. McCARTHY: I do not have the exact numbers, but for a period of time, if you look at 7 per cent, it is about 1.46 per cent a year. For the first several years we were in the program, we were actually, in interest, making more than that, so we were banking some money. The Auditor General said that if you discontinue, stop the program today, and had to pay it all back today, you would be short. The money we got last month, we do not have to pay it back for another four years, eleven months. So, we can earn interest on that before we have to pay it back.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: So how long will the program continue? The fact that you have to use the money or pay it back in five years – so the money you got in December 2009, you have to have paid back by December 2014?

MR. McCARTHY: Correct.

MR. SKINNER: If I could, just as a point of clarification, as I understood the question asked, it was money we received in December 2009 has to be paid back by December 2014. The answer to that is we would start making payments back in December.

MR. McCARTHY: No. We get money each month; we have to pay that back in the month five years hence.

MR. SKINNER: Payments five years hence. Not that it is paid back in five years.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Okay. So when December 2014 comes, you received, on December 1, 2009, a million dollars. Five years out, on December 1, 2014, do you have to give them back the million dollars plus the 7 per cent, or do you have to start back the repayments of that $1 million at 7 per cent?

MR. McCARTHY: What we get is, instead of a million dollars, we get 93 per cent. The feds keep their 7 per cent. So in five years out, we have to pay it back that month. It is not starting to pay it back, we have to pay it back that month.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: That month? That you have to pay them back the full whack that you got five years previous, less the 7 per cent administration fee?

MR. McCARTHY: Correct.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: So it is not a payment thing. You have to have that money in your pocket in five years time and give them all back?

MR. McCARTHY: Yes.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: How is it then – because when you are talking economic development, my understanding is the program works such that the immigrants put this money into the fund. There is a cost to the immigrant here, as I understand it. If someone, for example, in China wants to come to Canada, an attraction to bring them here would have been: Look, we will give you your visa or your landed immigrant status or whatever, you invest in this program, we are going to use your money to go to some less economically viable place in the country, try to encourage you to go there to invest in those areas, and hopefully it is a win-win for everybody. We have a new business because you came here with more people employed and we used your money to do it.

Is that how the program is supposed to work?

MR. McCARTHY: Yes.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: So, aside from the money piece now and the administrative costs, how many immigrants – have any immigrants come to this Province and started a business? According to the Auditor General, there was no money used.

I am assuming if there was no money used - is there a tie on what I am saying between the immigrant who comes in and the person who uses the money?

MR. McCARTHY: No.

MR. SKINNER: The money is received by the federal government from immigrants who are coming from other countries in the world and that goes into the federal coffers. Then the federal government distributes that to the provinces based upon a per capita and some formula that they use. The immigrant is accepted into the country by the federal government and that immigrant can go anywhere in the country he or she wishes. They do not necessarily come to Newfoundland and Labrador where some of their money or all of their money may have come. There is no connection to the immigrant coming to the province in which the money is sent or deposited by the federal government.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: That was my understanding as well, but I was not certain about it.

What are the linkages here between this fund and you had certain monies as Industry, Trade versus the Department of Business. I think there was reference in the AG report as well, and you alluded to it this morning, that we would not need to use our money if a person who wants to start a business can get money from the government through another department.

So what linkages - how do you keep each other informed, for example? If I am starting a business in this Province and I said: Okay, what pots of money does the government have? How do I get into the pots? I go off, I check it out, and I say: You have so much money there, and the Minister of Business has so much money over in his pot. Are there any lines between your two departments to make sure that everybody knows who is knocking on what doors?

MR. SKINNER: Yes.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Explain that process to me, how it works now?

MR. SKINNER: Yes, the short answer to that, Mr. Parsons is yes, and it would not be just between the Department of INTRD and the Department of Business. That would overlap potentially Natural Resources, the Department of Finance; there would be a myriad of departments that potentially would be involved.

In terms of how that process may work, if an individual makes contact with – let us assume their first point of contact is with INTRD. They deal with it might be our office here in Confederation Building; it might be one of our regional offices. An economic development officer within the department would end up discussing or speaking with that individual who is looking to start a business.

If it is something that they want to bring in from outside, if it is something new that they bringing in, we would automatically engage with the Department of Business as an inward investor. Bring them to the table for discussions and determine whether it was best held and discussed by the Department of Business or whether it was best held and discussed by the Department of INTRD.

Our officials at the ministerial, deputy and other levels - for instance, I meet with the Minister of Business, with my deputy and his deputy once a month usually. We will get together once a month to have a chat about things like this in terms of investment that may be coming in. There is stuff happening on a daily basis with other officials in the department that are crossing over in determining how best to handle a potential business start up. Whether one department or the other, or whether both may be able to feed into that.

Those things are happening because of the fact that we recognize that it is not necessarily black and white and that we need to be aware of what each other are doing. We also have - and maybe I will ask the deputy in terms of some of the interdepartmental committee that we have, that you have officials who sit around the table, aside from the ministers doing it, who will look at investment that people are looking to make into the Province and how best we may be able to help facilitate that with them.

MR. MEADE: Brent Meade.

Apart from the day-to-day interaction with Department of Business, or the Department of Finance, or Natural Resources, or other departments, there are two ways we are formally engaged in government.

All of the economic development departments meet on a regular basis in terms of looking at our programs and services, how we can keep them in sync with each other, how we maximize the funding that is available to them. That is a process that has been underway now for a couple of years. So, we have been doing that.

The Provincial Investment Attraction Strategy, which would be under the lead of the Department of Business, is a way to co-ordinate the efforts amongst all government departments on inward investment opportunities. So, that is two examples of where there is interdepartmental collaboration on economic development. I think it is suffice to say and I am confident in saying that there is strong co-ordination happening right now between the economic development departments.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: A little bit off the topic here, but an outside observer might get confused sometimes. The issue of the boot factory out in Harbour Grace and the investment - it is confusing sometimes because we are told under the programming that ITRD deals with funding of business proposals in the Province as opposed to the Department of Business, which is based upon bringing businesses from outside the Province. Yet, in that case, we have a case of - I guess sometimes it was a crossover because the boot company was here; yet, they made a funding decision on that particular plant and it came from the Department of Business as I understand it. Why did the money funnel through Business as opposed to ITRD in that case?

MR. SKINNER: The answer to that is that - you are quite correct - the initial operation was here; Terra Nova Shoes was here. They were purchased by a Canadian company as I understand it, Kodiak, which in turn were purchased by an American company - or at least this operational part of it was, I do not know all the corporate details – called Williamson-Dickie, I believe is the name of the company out of the United States.

While the indigenous company was here and the manufacturing facility was here, there was a consolidation of operations whereby a facility that was opened in Ontario merged some of their work into the operation here. So that was seen to be the inward investment that was made in the facility here and that is why Business was involved in providing the funding for that, or being a part of the funding for that.

If I could, just to look to staff, if anything I said there was a little bit inaccurate or needed clarification, feel free to –

OFFICIAL: No, that is correct.

MR. SKINNER: That is my understanding.

OFFICIAL: (Inaudible) inward investment by the Department of Business.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: So there was no involvement from your department in that particular initiative?

MR. SKINNER: No. To be clear, we had a lot of involvement; I would not want to leave you with the impression that we did not have any involvement. I am just detailing for you the flow of funds came from Business because it was deemed to be an inward investment, but we were very tightly tied to that file in terms of some of the analysis that went on, in terms of some of the financial overview, in terms of some of the economic spinoffs and why the Department of Business should be involved in that.

We have a financial review piece that we do that maybe I will ask the Assistant Deputy, Ms Malone, if she might want to speak to in terms of how we would have been tied to that file, which would be indicative of every other file that the Department of Business or any other department would be involved in. We are very tightly aligned with those.

MS MALONE: Yes, we have a detailed analysis process where we go through – and the minister is quite correct – whether it be an aquaculture loan with the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture or the Natural Resource loan or investment through the Forestry Industry Diversification Fund. It is a comprehensive assessment whether you are talking $50,000 or $500,000, which encompasses management, the marketing, financial abilities to repay debt, the security, the performance and desirability of economic impact, both direct and indirect.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Back to the CIC guidelines again, the investment fund, the Auditor General seems to have been particularly concerned about the guidelines would allow the funds to be used to finance capital projects in areas such as health and education, which could have, according to the guidelines, have positively impacted the economy of the Province and so on, but yet it was not done.

Can you give us some idea - he talks about there were discussions regarding the university and the regional health authorities as to how some of this funding might have been used. Without getting into any, obviously, privacy issues or whatever, what type of discussions unfolded that obviously never came to fruition according to him?

MR. SKINNER: I would have to look to Phil for that.

MR. McCARTHY: I do know that the board, the immigrant investor board, met with various departments, various deputy ministers. They did meet the Deputy Minister of Health. They did meet with people from Education. At that time, what they were looking for was some projects. You have some projects out there that you think may fall under this, can you give us a list so we take a list of projects that may fit under this program and bring it forward? They also talked to – it was not just those two departments, Transportation and Fisheries were also involved, and the Department of Business, to try to get a feel for some types of projects that could be out there.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Obviously, nothing ever came of it, I guess. There were no projects in those health fields or in those memorial fields that fit the guidelines as they were.

MR. McCARTHY: At the end of the day, it is a government decision on whether they want to proceed, and if they do proceed, whether this is the appropriate source of funds given it has to be paid back.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Okay. That is where I am headed with this.

Was it a decision of we do not think MUN, for example, projects that they have come to inquire about, fits this program, or was it a case of yes, it fits but we can do it better somewhere else? Can we get some idea of - because he almost leaves it as if Memorial, albeit could use this funding. It would be a great thing, it did not happen. I am just curious as to: Did it not happen for legitimate reasons? Because I would think there is a host of things that MUN could come up with that you might be able to use some funding for. What is it that made it not usable here?

MR. SKINNER: I would suggest to you, Mr. Parsons, that the decision was made that the source of funds would be better, from government's perspective, coming from another pot as opposed to that pot. Under our regular infrastructure monies we would have funded and provided the resources necessary to do whatever would have come up on that list as opposed to going to the Immigrant Investor Fund.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: So in terms of go-forward, Mr. McCarthy probably, you said you have had these discussions. Where do you see it headed now in terms of timelines and the guidelines? Is there a problem with the guidelines, problem with the administration fee? How do you see us as a Province maximizing this fund better than we have been doing? It is basically money there that we have not been using. How do you see us maximizing the use of this fund?

MR. McCARTHY: Well, the use of the funds is up to government, in terms that they look at it - the Department of Finance looks at it, this is borrowed money and has to be paid back. So we look at it from that perspective.

There have been discussions with the federal government; this is not just Newfoundland. It is all the provinces that are involved in this that have had discussions with the federal government. I would not be able to make a guess on when the federal government may move on some of this stuff. Sometimes they move quickly, sometimes they do not move so quickly. The timing is in their control, not in ours. The board is looking at ways and means of what they may be able to do now, given the low interest rates, in trying to do something to mitigate the fact now that interest rates are less than one-fifth of 7 per cent. There are also discussions with the feds about having the 7 per cent lowered to another number.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: This board that you referred to, what is the composition of the board?

MR. McCARTHY: The composition of the board is civil servants from INTRD and Finance.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Are there any laypersons on the board?

MR. McCARTHY: No, there is not.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Okay.

I have no further questions on that particular area. If I could, again, jump all over the place here.

Probably one of my favourite topics, I guess the fibre optic piece has been kicking around for some time. Minister, maybe just for the record again, if you could go back and as a little overview, tell us the current status of the project right now.

MR. SKINNER: The current status of the Broadband Initiative of government is that we recently pulled back from trying to own and manage our own network due to the cost escalation that we saw as we were reviewing the project and analyzing the project, and having negotiations with private companies on how we were going to achieve that. That number escalated from $200 million to over $500 million over a period of time.

We are now re-evaluating how we are going to provide high-speed Internet services to all of the government buildings, facilities, agencies, boards, et cetera but we will do that now in potentially a public-private partnership in some ways. We will negotiate with suppliers of services to see - as opposed to government 100 per cent owning and managing its own network - if there are operational efficiencies that we can achieve and economic development opportunities that might be able to be derived by us looking to partner in some areas with some of the private enterprises, because they already have a presence and have an infrastructure base in some areas of the Province that we wish to expand upon.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Again, if I have the facts screwed up here, by all means, correct me. My understanding initially of this was this was seen as a great opportunity. We put $15 million into a private enterprise. That enterprise was going to develop. The technology in the Province – we would get so many strands and use them for our purposes and so on; connectivity was going to be all over the place. There were figures bandied around, the Premier in Question Period one day said something to the tune of $400 million that is going to be saved just in government services alone once we put this plan in place.

What is your understanding of what happened to the corporate bodies that were involved in that? We made our initial investment to Persona and so on. Are any of the same players around these days or did that all just disappear after the investment was made?

MR. SKINNER: I am not quite sure what you mean by –

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Well, I understand we put our money into the process through Persona, and Persona was in a partnership with some other mainland companies, a company out of Manitoba I do believe and another one.

MR. SKINNER: Okay.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Anyway, my understanding is that soon after we put our money in the company was flipped. Persona, who was the receiver of the government process, our $15 million went into this initiative but the company got flipped in the marketplace shortly after.

Has Persona been involved in this proposal long? Is that correct information that I have, that Persona was never involved in this after a short term?

MR. SKINNER: It is my understanding that the $15 million investment that government made back in 2007, I think it was, was as you indicated in your earlier comments, to own a certain number of strands in a fibre optic line. I am going from memory here, but I believe there are twenty-four strands and I think it was six strands that we would have owned and had access to in that fibre optic line.

In terms of the corporate entities that were involved, and what has happened with those corporate entities, I have no particular knowledge of that. So, I am really not sure what happened. I do not know if any of the staff may be able to – I was not directly involved in those negotiations. I am not sure who the parties were.

MR. MEADE: Brent Meade, Deputy Minister.

If I understand the question, Mr. Parsons, is you are asking what has happened with those companies that bought into the trans-gulf. Well, they have expanded. The flip you are referring to is Persona being taken over by EastLink. We had MTS Allstream and we have Rogers. What we have seen since that time is an expansion of service throughout Newfoundland and Labrador by those companies. We have seen more products and services, better pricing, which has all been evident by the trans-gulf investment.

I think there are two stories here: one is the trans-gulf investment in order to try and facilitate stronger private sector involvement and expansion in the provision of broadband and other telecommunication services in Newfoundland and Labrador, and we have seen great enhancement of that with the trans-gulf line. The second issue, then, is us having access to six lines on that as part of GBI, and the minister has given you the update on where we are with GBI.

In terms of those companies, the same companies are at the table with the exception, obviously, of Persona being taken over by EastLink, but we have seen them expand their services throughout Newfoundland and Labrador with the trans-gulf line.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: How long have we had access to these six lines?

MR. MEADE: From the time that we would have built the trans-gulf, since 2007.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Okay. Have we been using it?

MR. MEADE: No, they are not lit yet.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Okay, that is what I am getting at. My understanding is you have so many lines on this fibre optic cable, in my simplistic terms of seeing this. We have not used any of these six lines since we made the investment. We were out with RFPs trying to find some way to get someone involved so that we could use these six lines to tie, for example, our social service offices, our courthouses, our police stations and whatever, all together to improve the communications compatibilities in the Province from a high-speed point of view. We have been several years and we have not been able to do that. Why haven't we been able to find someone? What is the problem? Why have we gone from $200 million to $500 million?

MR. SKINNER: No pun intended; that is the million dollar question.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Yes, and in particular, why these companies that we were – they are the guys who got us involved in this in the first place and we own six strands of their cable. Were they potential partners? If so, why are they not involved with us? If they are making all of these great strides as private companies, as alluded to by Mr. Meade, could there not have been something worked out in the last three or fours years to make it work for us and them?

MR. SKINNER: No, and the short answer is, that was what we had hoped would happen. There was an RFP issued, as you indicated. There were multiple responses to that RFP. There was a significant evaluation process that had to occur. There was a split award of the RFP and there were negotiations entered into. That negotiation process – one of the preferred bidders, if I could use that term, or one of the people that we awarded the split award to, voluntarily walked away from the table. They just felt that they could not meet the objectives that they had indicated in their response to the RFP that they could fulfil. They felt they could not fulfil those obligations, so they walked away from the table and sort of left a bit of a void there. At the same time, concurrently, there were negotiations going on with the other part of the split award and the cost creep on that made it prohibitive for government to move forward.

The potential was there to conclude a deal but the overriding factor was the cost of doing that, and we just felt that it was cost prohibitive. We felt that is was better to stand down, come back and learn from the lessons of the RFP, talk to the partners who had bid and try to come up with a new approach. That is the process that we are currently involved in, trying to determine a different approach to achieve the same objective that we had before.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: What led to the cost overruns? We have a $500 million problem as opposed to the $200 million we anticipated. What went so terribly wrong? We had all of this great insight and foresight when we were putting in $15 million to get these fibres but obviously something happened.

MR. SKINNER: Yes.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: What was it? What drove the cost beyond the payout here?

MR. SKINNER: Yes. Well, I am going to now give you my layman's interpretation of it because I am not an IT specialist or an IT engineer. I will do my best to give you some high level overview and then I will look to staff who may be able to fill in some gaps and may be able to provide a bit more detail.

The short answer, as I understand it, is that back when the RFP process was initiated there was a general understanding that there were hundreds of locations that we wanted to provide high-speed Internet to. Those locations were generally identified in terms of being government offices and government facilities. There was an assessment done of where services currently existed, where lines were currently run and where lines were not run. There were ballpark assumptions made as to how far away you are from the nearest point of attachments, whether that is one kilometre or ten kilometres or fifty kilometres. How much of a high-speed line would you have to run if you wanted to get down to the end of that road? What kind of infrastructure, in terms of repeater stations and electronic gadgets, would you need at the end of a pole or at the end of a building? How much would you need in terms of – could you go over land, did you have to go under land? All of these very detailed questions were posed at the beginning and best guesstimates were made as to how much of that kind of thing would be needed.

As the process unfolded, and the preferred bidders started to drill down on some of that and more finite numbers came into it, the normal cost creep of an eighteen to twenty-four month process occurred, in terms of the cost of services going up, the cost of labour going up, the cost of product going up, et cetera, et cetera, all of that happened naturally. So there was some of that natural creep, and then some of the guesstimates that were made were determined that when we drilled down into it and they got a little more fine-tuned there was more cost creep in terms of that as well. That, in a general sense, is what happened.

In terms of specifics to that, people who were involved in the actual project might be able to provide you with more detail on that. I am looking to Paul in particular, Mr. Morris, our Acting ADM, if he might be able to provide you with more detail.

MR. MORRIS: When the project was initially started and discussions started being initially held, the initial figure that was out there of approximately $200 million to $250 million to do the project was actually based on government's communications costs at that time, at that point in time, around 2005. The project was anticipated and the desire was to have the project to be cost neutral over the life of the project, over ten years. So, when government looked at its communications costs, we were spending approximately $20 million a year at that time; when we looked at it over a ten-year period that would be approximately $200 million. That is where that initial figure came from.

When we included Labrador into the project, and the cost of crossing The Straits, the estimate at that time would be that it would cost $100 million to do Labrador and $20 million to cross over The Straits. So when we started developing the RFP process, we were estimating around $320 million, in that ballpark. When the RFPs came in they were slightly more than that, and that is what led to the start of the negotiations.

When we started negotiating, we started negotiating with two companies. One of those companies, actually, was part of the trans-gulf deal at the time. It is now Eastlink, because of the change in ownership. When the negotiations proceeded there was a cost escalation factor, as the minister said quite rightly. There was more engineering work being done, there was more detailed work being done, and that is what led to the ultimate cost that was deemed to be too high.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: This started back in 2005, when you did these original estimates. We are, obviously, five years in. Have we been paying any rental or anything on that fibre optics since we paid the $15 million or are they just sitting there unlit, not being used?

MR. SKINNER: They are just sitting there unlit at this point.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: What kind of ownership is it? Do we own these absolutely for all time? As long as they are on that cable we own them, whether we get our house in order 2015 or 2020, we can go back at any time and use them?

MR. SKINNER: That is my understanding, yes.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Given the technologies, is there any concern that what we bought and paid for in 2005 will not be usable by us when and if you come up with some kind of proposal?

MR. SKINNER: Not to my understanding, Mr. Parsons.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Any technical -

MR. SKINNER: I will ask Mr. Morris to respond, if I could.

MR. MORRIS: With respect to the actual fibre, no, there is no limit. There is no limit at all on that. The limitation comes into play with the electronics that are put in place afterwards. So, to date, there has been no electronics installed. When the electronics are installed there is generally about a five-year renewal process there. That is the big part in the planning process, is to do the design work so that the appropriate electronics are put in place.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Okay. How much have we spent so far in trying to get this to work, other than the initial investment? What does it cost for all these RFPs we have been doing, the time involved, engineering that we have done? Somebody has been paying for this stuff. What is a ballpark?

MR. MORRIS: The work that was undertaken to develop the RFP, had to evaluate the RFP and to get us to the point where we are today, we have spent approximately $1.1 million.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: What percentage right now of connectivity is there amongst government agencies, shall we say? Is there any at all? When you talk about health care facilities, government offices in Corner Brook, Grand Falls-Windsor or wherever, what percentage - we had hoped to get 100 per cent connectivity, I call it, with high speed if this process had worked. I take it we are still at zero right now?

MR. SKINNER: All of those agencies that you just referred to are connected to the Internet and have connectivity. In terms of how much of that would be high speed, how much of that would be other levels, I do not know at this point. I do not know if Mr. Morris would be able to estimate that. If not, that might be something we would have to undertake to provide to you. I do no know if anyone else would have it but I do not have it. They are all connected. I guess the level of connection would be the question. I do not have that information.

CHAIR: Mr. Morris.

MR. MORRIS: We do not have that information here right now but we can endeavour to get it.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: I guess what I am getting at here, in a nutshell, is we had hoped to have this high-speed process. We are no further ahead now than we were back in 2005. As a result of this investment we are no further ahead today, as we speak, than when we made the $15 million payout; a fair statement?

MR. SKINNER: No, I would disagree with that statement.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Okay, tell me where I am off base on that statement.

MR. SKINNER: We are further ahead in the sense that we do have now a redundant line so that if the original line that we had went down, as it had in the past and we were left without service to the Province, we would now have a redundant line that would provide us with service. That investment has provided more competition into our marketplace here in the Province. We have had more service providers providing different levels of services. So at a local community level you are now not just tied to one cable station or one Internet provider. There are, in some cases, multiples. You have competition in the marketplace, so rates have reduced.

We have been told by commercial operators that their rates have been reduced because of the competition in the marketplace. So there have been benefits accrued from the time we made the initial investment to today. In terms of maximizing the investment, which is what our ultimate goal is, we have not yet maximized that, but that is why we are working towards the connectivity of all government offices in terms of the broadband initiative. That was what the RFP was intended to accomplish and we know where we are today with that.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: How far along are we or maybe that is corporate, sensitive information, but in terms of the overall strand when you talk about how other private industry, for example, are more competitive now and people in the communities get better rates and so on. What portion of the cable is maximized at the present time? We know we have our six strands, but of the other eighteen strands, for example, what is the capacity on them right now? Are they maxed out?

MR. SKINNER: I think the deputy might have some information, so I will ask him to provide that to you.

MR. MEADE: Yes, and Paul Morris can certainly correct me or add to this. Some little fibre is still dark from the companies, but it is suffice to say, and you are right, without releasing corporate information, there are substantial expansion plans from a couple of carriers in the works right now for this year. We know from two partners in particular, who own fibre on the trans-gulf line that they are in the midst of rolling out substantial expansion throughout Newfoundland and Labrador.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Our unlit six fibres, where do you see this going now? We are off the rails in terms of what we had hoped to do. Where do you see this, minister, going in terms of - what are our options that we have to use that?

MR. SKINNER: We are still on the rails; I do not think we are off the rails. We had a path that we had planned on going down. Upon venturing down that path a certain way we determined that it was not in the best interest of the taxpayers of the Province to continue down that road. So we basically backed up a little bit and are now re-evaluating a different direction in partnership, as I indicated, in some cases with service providers to be able to provide the levels of service and maximize those six strands that are in that fibre optic line. The objective is still the same. The goal is still the same. The way in which we are going to get there has to be re-evaluated. We are currently undertaking that evaluation and hope to, in the very near future, be able to determine what our new plan will be to achieve those objectives.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: That is where I was hoping to get some response to. Maybe Mr. Morris, being technical or whatever, can tell us. Looking at it from what you are telling me, we started out with this, we were going to have six fibres, and we were going to tie a bunch of people together with high speed. We know that the cost jumped from $200 million to $500 million. It is off the rails. As far as I am concerned, if you start a project five years ago and we have come to the determination that we cannot do what we wanted to do, it is off the rails. Now, we might have to put it back on the rails, and it may well go back on the rails, but right now, as we speak, we have gotten zero. Other than the benefits you talked about in competition, in terms of the government providing high-speed services to government offices in this Province, we are no further ahead now than where we were in 2005.

When I asked you about future options – if we have already determined, for example, that even the people who own the other eighteen fibres do not want to partner with us on this, obviously - they were your preferred bidders and nothing happened there after five years with them. How do you see this ever working? If the very people who own the other eighteen fibres cannot get any economies of scale to do it with us, where do you see us going to find some other third party? Is that unreasonable on my part to assume that?

I would think it is easier for the EastLinks of the world to say: We will partner with you because we own the rest of it. If we have to put electronics in place, for example, as Mr. Morris alluded to, or we have to go out and maintain this, it is easier for me to go out, as an Eastlink, to look after your six in a partnership with you as it is when I go out and look after my eighteen. So, if that has fallen apart, what reasonable alternatives do you see there, other than saying we are going to seek to partner with someone? I am at a loss to figure out who might be other partners. If there were, they would have been in with us already.

MR. SKINNER: Your basic premise is the one that I think is leading you to a wrong assumption, if I could say that to you. It is not that we cannot partner with the EastLinks or any of the other partners; it is that the original plan was that government would own and manage its own network. So there was no partnering considered. That is the very distinct point that I think you need to understand.

We were going it alone on the original RFP and it was deemed to be too expensive to do that. These preferred bidders, and others who were not preferred bidders – I will say this to you as well – are interested in partnering. That is the opportunity that they see for themselves and we see for us. Now that they know government is not proceeding on its own to build and manage its own network, they do see opportunities to partner and are very interested in partnering with government. That is a part of the re-evaluation of the approach we are going to take as we move forward, that we are currently undertaking right now. We will determine which areas partnering opportunities may exist, which areas government would be better off going it alone, and the companies will help us in terms of deciding some of those. Those are the kinds of discussions that need to be had and need to be undertaken to allow us to map out our new plan.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Maybe if you can take me back then, or someone can: Why did we think in the first place that we could go it alone? We have had that experience now, we have learnt. With hindsight we can look back and say no matter what we thought five years ago, we could not pull this off by ourselves. What made us think back then that we could go it alone?

I would have thought back then if there are three people who have an investment source, who have the technology, they are the people who are going to own eighteen of the twenty-four. Why would I not have thought from day one that it is a better shot with those than going it alone? That is what I cannot understand. Why did we think that in the first place?

MR. SKINNER: It is my understanding that –

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: What were the reasons for wanting to go it alone? Other than thinking we could do it, what was the cost factor, what were the benefits, the return on this thing for us to go it alone?

MR. SKINNER: Well, it is my understanding that at the time that the decision was made to go it alone, it was deemed to be – as Mr. Morris indicated in his earlier comments; we were paying some $20 million to $25 million per year to rent services. That would be something, if we continued in that mode that would continue on forever. We would always be a renter and we would always be at the whim of the marketplace in terms of how much we will pay to be a renter of services.

That $200 million to $250 million ten-year cost, if you extrapolated that out many tens of years later, would obviously be a much greater number. There was an analysis done as to what we felt it would cost to be able to provide the services ourselves, to own and manage the operations ourselves. That was deemed to be cost effective over an approximately ten-year period when the initial evaluation occurred.

The reason why we felt it was better to go it alone was because we felt that after around a ten-year period we would have paid back the initial investment, assuming the cost had remained as we expected them to be. Government then would be in a position where it would not be a renter, it would be an owner of its own assets, paying for the capital would have already occurred and potentially there would be opportunities maybe to provide opportunity for private individuals, private companies, corporate entities who may want to use some of the six strands if we had any surplus available to us. That was the initial thought way back when.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Would it be fair to say then until such time as we decide what is the option, what options are available and until that process is negotiated and put in place, we are not going to be any better off when it comes to government offices being high-speed than we were in 2005? If that takes another five years to work that out, that is how long it is going to have to take.

MR. SKINNER: In terms of not being any better off, we are as well off today as we were five years ago. We will be as well off next year because we are still a renter of services. Whatever technology is out there and whatever level of services is out there, we will have that level of service. It will be no better, no worse. The better part of it comes when government has its own fibre lit up and we are using our own fibre and connecting our own offices and we are paying back the capital investment that we have made.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Has there been any change in the thought process regarding who could ultimately hook on to the cable? I know I had issues in my district, for example, people say to bring the cable across the Gulf, you power it up in Rose Blanche, and it hits the shore in Burgeo and gets powered up and down the coast and powered up again. I had everybody in Burgeo screaming saying: When are we going to hook on?

My understanding was, of course, that was never the government's intention to allow individuals to hook on; it was intended to be government offices and agencies and so on. Has there been any thought given to possibly being able to utilize it, or is it ever capable of being utilized to provide services to individuals?

MR. SKINNER: The intention of government originally - and it is still the intention today - is to provide services to our own facilities. By providing services to our own facilities, communities that are currently underserviced or unserviced would have an opportunity, through the private carriers that are out there, to be able to hook on. We would allow the private carriers to tap into the government infrastructure to provide residential services to the communities that are under or unserviced. That was the intent originally, that is still the intent today.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: Who actually manages the cable right now in government? How does it work, physically? Is it just sitting there in this line? It is not lit, so it does not cost anybody anything to look after it or it is just – it is that simple.

MR. SKINNER: That is basically how it is, as I understand it. I do not know if –

OFFICIAL: Basically.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: There is no cost there. We are not using it. We cannot use it. It is nobody's job to look after it every day sort of thing. It is just there.

MR. SKINNER: We know it is there and at some point we will get to it.

MR. KELVIN PARSONS: That is all the questions I have at this point. Maybe Ms Michael –

CHAIR: Ms Michael.

MS MICHAEL: Yes, thank you.

I have to sort of get my head back into this after an hour of being outside, but I do have questions. Just give me one second to make sure I am totally organized here.

I do not think I am going to do line by line at the moment. I have some broader questions and I will relate them to the sections in the budget.

CHAIR: Are you going to ask questions now about the department itself?

MS MICHAEL: I am going to stay within the department because that is where we are. I do have questions about the other, but I think we might as well wait and do that together.

MR. SKINNER: Sure.

MS MICHAEL: I will stay in the department until we move into the research body.

CHAIR: I just mentioned that because we did say at the beginning that we did have officials here from this agency and we deal with that at the beginning so that those people could move on rather than sit through all of this.

MR. SKINNER: We are okay.

CHAIR: That is okay?

MR. SKINNER: We can go through the department. That is fine.

CHAIR: Okay, perfect.

MS MICHAEL: I am happy to do that, but the Liberals might want to ask a question so it seems we might as well stay together.

CHAIR: Okay.

MS MICHAEL: Thank you. I will just do this then.

The first one then, 1.2.04., we are dealing with the Strategic Initiatives, Strategic Partnership, and the Ireland Business Partnerships.

I am just wondering, Minister, about a couple of things. I will ask this first and then put a general question. Under Professional Services, the money has gone down from the Budget to the Revised to the Estimates. I just want to get a sense of what is happening there. What would be the professional services that we are dropping or were they a one-time related professional service, et cetera?

MR. SKINNER: In terms of specifics on that, Ms Michael, I will refer to the Director of the Ireland Business Partnerships, and I will ask her to provide you with some details on that. I just know that generally the level of services required is less, but in terms of specifics I do not have that at my fingertips. So I will ask Ms Hooper to provide you with that information.

MS MICHAEL: Great.

MS HOOPER: As you know, this covers both the Ireland Business Partnerships and the Strategic Partnership Initiative.

As far as Ireland Business Partnerships goes we essentially rightsized the budget. We determined that we would require less money in our professional services budget for next year based on the money that we had been spending.

As it relates to the Strategic Partnership, they have allocated a certain amount of money for the new committees that they have established. Those committees are still working through their work plans so they did not use the amount of professional services that had initially been estimated, but they do expect to use that in the coming year.

MS MICHAEL: I wonder, minister, could we have a bit of a breakdown of the work that is actually being covered by the Strategic Partnership?

MR. SKINNER: Before I answer that, if I could, there is just one other piece of information I wanted to provide to you on professional services. There was a direction or a directive given from Finance at the start of the budgetary process last fall that all professional services should be zero based. There was no sort of, we used fifty last year, we are going to use fifty next year. You had to start with zero dollars and build it up to what you expected to use.

When Ms Hooper refers to rightsizing it that is basically what happened. In every category of professional services, that approach was taken. It was zeroed out and we just built it up based upon the activity we thought that would happen in there through the coming year.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. Great, thank you.

MR. SKINNER: In terms of the Strategic Partnership and some of the activity, I will ask my deputy if I could, who sits on that committee maybe to provide you with some information. If you have any other questions, we will try to answer them.

MR. MEADE: I am understanding, Ms Michael, supporting information later is fine, or would you like an overview now?

MS MICHAEL: Maybe a really brief overview now and then the details you could send later if that is all right.

MR. MEADE: Okay. The Strategic Partnership, as you know it is a partnership between government, labour and business.

MS MICHAEL: That is right.

MR. MEADE: They have five active subcommittees right now in a number of areas: employment relations, labour relations, population, transportation, communications, and innovation. These are active subcommittees that are doing work with the tripartite membership on those committees. That is actively pursuing.

Dr. Doug House is the independent chair of the Strategic Partnership.

MS MICHAEL: Yes.

MR. MEADE: They are conducting a number of research initiatives through the subcommittees. The Strategic Partnership through its three organizations: government, Innovation, Trade and Rural Development is lead department there, but also the Business Coalition and the Federation of Labour are also conducting research.

We are doing a lot of work with the Harris Centre, a lot of work with Memorial University in a number of research areas. They had their first symposium last fall which was a major symposium that occurred here in St. John's bringing together the three partners.

Out of that, it really did kick-start the process really well in terms of, particularly the engagement of government departments. One of the big challenges we have had as a department, to be quite frank with you, is to try to get other departments in government to understand the tremendous resource that the Strategic Partnership is in the development of public policy.

We have seen accelerated activity there where government departments are bringing issues to the partnership to discuss them, to get their input into it as we develop public policy. That is in a nutshell a list of things, but we can provide to you a report, a list of activities, particularly research projects we have done and whatnot in the past year.

MS MICHAEL: That would be great, Mr. Meade, if we could have that. Maybe, Minister, then to add to that maybe a list of the grants and subsidies that have been covered by the budget over the past year.

MR. SKINNER: Sure. We will do that, yes.

MS MICHAEL: Great. Thank you very much.

I have another question with regard to the Strategic Enterprise Development Fund. I guess it is really a general question that I have. Again, could we just have an overview of how the Strategic Enterprise Development Fund is used?

Going back some time, the Auditor General had issues at one point with the fund and with issues of repayment of money. I guess I would just like an overview of what is happening at the moment, how repayment happens and how you make sure it happens.

MR. SKINNER: That particular line item would be our Business and Market Development Program. I am going to look to staff to give you some detail as to what is being expended and spent with that.

MS MICHAEL: I am looking at line 3.1.05., there is $1 million that is consistently kept there for that, so I would like some detail on that.

McCARTHY: (Inaudible) program and that is a non-repayable program where we provide businesses with up to $25,000 matching to explore new business and new marketing ideas.

MS MICHAEL: Looking at the line item, you had a budget of $1 million last year, revised to $1 million and it is being continued. So am I to assume that all $1 million last year was spent? If we could have, again, an itemized list of that.

Was that money always non-repayable under that?

McCARTHY: The Business and Market Development Program was, yes.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. Thank you very much.

MR. SKINNER: If I could, we just wanted to make one point of clarification. I will ask the deputy to do that for you, Ms Michael.

MR. MEADE: Ms Michael, you will notice under the description of Strategic Enterprise Development it refers to the Business Investment Corporation.

MS MICHAEL: Yes.

MR. MEADE: Just so you understand, we did not have to put money into the BIC last year nor do we have to put money into it this year, but that is a revolving loan equity program that we have. So there is a BIC board, a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise program, SME program, that provides loans and equity. That does not show on our Estimates because that has gone out; that is sitting now and it is revolving with the BIC board. Under this, we would also be thinking of, as a department, our support to businesses in that way.

MS MICHAEL: If I could ask a further question then because that is what I wanted to get at: How is the repayment of money monitored? Is it clearly stated how that happens or -

MR. MEADE: Oh, yes.

MS MICHAEL: - does it change with every loan or what are the details on that?

MR. MEADE: Maybe Rita could speak to that.

MS MALONE: We have our development officers who have a portfolio, so not only are they responsible for providing investments, it could be to a loan or equity. They are also responsible for the ordinary monitoring and collections of their portfolio. The portfolio is monitored on a monthly basis or more often if a client falls in arrears or, in fact, falls deeply in arrears and has to go into receivership. Beyond that, as the management team and through the BIC, we have regular reporting on the performance of that portfolio.

I am pleased to say that our portfolio, in terms of our new program regime that we put in place since 2005, is performing very well. That consists of term loans as well as equity investments.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. Thank you very much.

Just a question with regard to the Canada/Newfoundland and Labrador Business Service Network, 3.1.03. in the lines. I guess I would like to know – I understand that this money supports the network with more than thirty locations in the Province and I understand its role. I would imagine that you do keep a list of the people, the businesses that you have been involved with, that you give advice to over the year, et cetera. Could we have some idea of that? If you do have that information on paper – which I am sure you do – it would be good to have that information as well.

MR. McCARTHY: Phil McCarthy.

We have that information. I do not have it with me, but we do know how many came in - mail, fax, walk-ins, all like that. We can get you that information.

MS MICHAEL: Right, so it happens on every level I would imagine.

MR. McCARTHY: (Inaudible).

MS MICHAEL: How many staff is involved with maintaining that network?

MR. McCARTHY: This is federal and provincial. There are five provincial and I am going to guess at the federal, it is around nine or ten.

MS MICHAEL: Right.

Are they located outside of the – so, they are located in offices?

MR. McCARTHY: No, all of these staff is located in St. John's. The ones outside were in partnership with a whole pile of different groups, some could be INTRD offices, some could be municipalities and there are other economic development groups, REDBs, groups like that.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. Thank you.

I look forward to getting that information as well.

Because I have started the way I have, I have to go through papers to get to where I want to be. I am looking at the Regional Economic Development Services, and what struck me here – everything else is pretty straightforward, except looking at Transportation and Communications under 4.1.01.03, there is quite a difference between what was budgeted last year and what is ultimately the estimate for this year. It is a difference of $136,000, I think. What happened along there that made that drop from the Budget of 2009-2010 down to this year?

MR. SKINNER: I will give you the high level answer, Ms Michael, as I understand it and I will leave the door open for staff to jump in and supplement my response to you.

Within Transportation and Communications, there was $130,000 of grant and subsidy money from the Poverty Reduction Strategy. Now, I cannot explain to you how it ended up in Transportation and Communications, but that is where it ended up. This year we took it out and we moved it down into Grants and Subsidies. So, if anyone can explain why it was there last year, I will ask them to do it. I cannot, but that is where it ended up. The $130,000 just got shifted from that category number 03. down to 10.

MS MICHAEL: Okay.

MR. SKINNER: If anyone can help with that – Ms Malone.

MS MALONE: The Transportation and Communications vote is for staff but last year when we received three new programs under the Poverty Reduction as part of the overall strategy, the transportation component of that was put into the staff vote as opposed to being put down in the grants piece. Those types of programs were to pay for travel for community citizens to engage and take capacity building type courses or to engage in micro lending or various capacity building programs we have for underprivileged marginalized people. So it was incorrectly posted in Transportation, it should have been down in Grants.

MS MICHAEL: Well, with it moved down to Grants – and I will ask for a list of the Grants and Subsidies under this line item – I would visibly be able to see that a certain amount of money, the $130,000, I would be able to find out exactly where it all went to poverty reduction?

MS MALONE: Yes.

MS MICHAEL: Yes, okay. Well, I would be really interested in having that information, and with a smile on my face, the minister will understand why I want that information.

The other thing I want to question then is under the Grants and Subsidies there is $43 million extra occurred between the Budget of 2009-2010 and the revision and then we are back to the original again. What happened in the revision? What is that about?

MR. SKINNER: That, Ms Michael, in a nutshell, was the Central region and the closure of the Abitibi Bowater mill. That was the severance and other entitlements; severance, the pensions for the widows, the sick benefits. All of that stuff was – how much is the amount right now?

OFFICIAL: $43 million.

MR. SKINNER: Was spent.

MS MICHAEL: Well, that fits it because the $43 million extra - that is what it is. It was $43 million on the button.

Is that all the money that now will have to be spent in that category or is there more money to go out?

MR. SKINNER: No, there would be a little bit more. My understanding is, correct me if I am wrong, but there are some of the pension and other entitlements which will require future payments and –

OFFICIAL: That is included.

MR. SKINNER: Okay, that has been included. I just wanted to be – it is included already in trust.

MS MICHAEL: Okay.

MR. SKINNER: That money has been allocated in trust but payments will occur on a go-forward basis but the money has already been budgeted here. There will be no more expenditures from a line item perspective, but there will be payouts from the trust.

MS MICHAEL: Right, the total is the $43 million.

MR. SKINNER: Yes.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. Thank you.

I figured that was it, but you have to get the answer.

There are a number of places, and I do not know if I need to go through each one. Maybe we could take it for granted that wherever there are Grants and Subsides that we could get a list of all Grants and Subsidies with the heading, of course, of where they are coming from rather than my going through every line and saying I want that list of Grants and Subsidies and go through everyone. All the various Grants and Subsides would be very helpful, to receive those.

MR. SKINNER: As a point of clarification, Ms Michael, are you requesting the Grants and Subsidies that were dispersed in 2009-2010 or are you requesting a list of those that we see dispersing in 2010-2011?

MS MICHAEL: I guess I would like both, that would be helpful. The ones from last year, obviously, you have.

MR. SKINNER: Yes.

MS MICHAEL: If you are anticipating new ones that look like they are definitely happening, that would be good to have as well.

MR. SKINNER: Okay. That will be provided. The caveat I will say to you is we will be very specific on the 2009-2010 information.

MS MICHAEL: Absolutely.

MR. SKINNER: We will have to be a little bit broader, a little bit more general on the 2010-2011 information.

MS MICHAEL: That is understandable. Okay.

You obviously have projections, so it is the projections that I would be interested in having the details of.

MR. SKINNER: Yes, fair enough.

MS MICHAEL: Thank you very much.

I do not know if Mr. Dean wants to start asking some questions.

CHAIR: First, I will ask the other members if they have any other questions. No.

Mr. Dean.

MR. DEAN: Thank you.

When you go away you have to come back and try to get your mind back around it again and figure out where things went since you left.

I have a question around the Grants and Subsidies as well, just to start, under 3.1.01. Business Analysis, "… research, development, coordination…" and so on of the financial programs. We have $2.5 million Revised in this year and we are going to go to $4.9 million in the Estimates for next year, is that right? Can you provide some detail around that as to what we anticipate to do differently?

MR. SKINNER: Yes, I will give you a general explanation for that. The number was down from $3.2 million to $2.5 million because of our subsidies program that we have with the contact centres, the call centres, and certain employment targets and wage subsidies that will be paid. So, because that industry did not perform as well as we had expected or budgeted them to, there was less of that kind of money being paid out.

The reason why it increases in the coming year is because of the environmental issue we have at the Marystown Shipyard in terms of the shed and the lead paint. There is a budgeted amount of $2.5 million to look after that liability, and that would come out of that. That is an environmental liability that we have in Marystown with the Kiewit facility.

MR. DEAN: Okay, good.

Then on the Research & Development Corporation as well, something is changing again from last year to this year. We had a Budget of $24 million, did not do that, and we are back up to $25 million again in our Estimates for 2010-2011.

MR. SKINNER: Just for clarification, Mr. Dean, are you referring now to line items in the Research & Development Corporation Estimates?

MR. DEAN: Yes, sorry. I am jumping around a bit.

CHAIR: Yes. While you were out we decided we would do the departmental Estimates now and go back to that after.

MR. DEAN: Okay, not a problem.

MR. SKINNER: If that works for you, if you are okay with that.

MR. DEAN: That is fine. No, we will leave it. That is no problem.

Just a couple of general questions, I guess, about temporary contracts in the department. Can you give us an idea of how many, the thirteen week or less, contracts in the department that we would have gone through or done in the past fiscal year?

MR. SKINNER: I will have to defer to staff. I do not have a number. I know we go through them periodically but I do not have a specific number at my fingertips. Can anyone help? The deputy will have a shot at it.

MR. MEADE: Mr. Dean, I guess the thing is, if the question is: What are the positions in the department that are temporary? That is a different question than how many people would be thirteen-week temporary assignments or contractual in the department.

The Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development has about 25 per cent of its workforce in temporary positions. We have a staff complement of around 180. It fluctuates, obviously, but it is anywhere from 170 to 180, sometimes up to 200; 25 per cent of them would be in temporary positions, but many of those positions are long-standing temporary positions. We are not unique as a department in that, by the way. There are other departments in the same position.

In terms of positions that would be contractual, or what I would define as a true temporary, we could count them, I think, on one hand. We could count them on one hand. We normally only use those for very particular initiatives or pressure points that we have in the department. For example, right now we would have people in the department who have been seconded from other departments and we would have contractual people in the department to deal specifically with the Canada-EU negotiations. That would be an example of where we would have a temporary need that we would fill through a number of different means. We can certainly give you the specific numbers at a certain point in time that we would have. We are not a department that employs a lot of contractual or true temporary employees.

MR. DEAN: Okay. Is there a procedure in the case of the ones that we have when we – do we do contract renewals with the same people, or how does that work?

MR. SKINNER: Again, if you are talking about temporary people versus contract people, because there is a difference –

MR. DEAN: Yes. Temporary contracts, I guess, basically is -

MR. SKINNER: The deputy indicates that we have one right now. I am not sure of the details of that. I would assume there was an RFP or request for services or something like that done, that kind of a thing.

MR. DEAN: Right, okay.

Some of the programs in the department that provide loans and so on to companies and whatever, how much of those loans along the way, if you could give us some kind of an idea - how much of those loans along the way basically are forgiven year after year or year over year?

MR. SKINNER: I will defer to the ADM in a second but I will say this to you, that the department's portfolio has a lot of old loans from old programs that we have to manage and the performance on those, as I understand it, has not necessarily been very good. Recent times, recent being in the last five or six years, we have a different portfolio management approach. We have a different loan approach and our default rate would be much, much better in the sense it is much, much less. That is at a high level but I will ask the ADM, Ms Malone, to give you a little bit more detail on that.

MR. DEAN: Thank you.

MS MALONE: Around 8 per cent are our default and/or laagered loans. Our current portfolio we have had since 2005 is performing, as I said earlier to Ms Michael, very well. We are generally in an 8 per cent to 10 per cent on terms of arrears or delinquent. We are not in the business of forgiving because when they get into a fully delinquent or the account closes, we attempt to recoup on the security and or the investment. So the business of forgiveness is not generally a routine policy. In fact, it is one of a write off after we try to recoup all that we can under the security documentation.

MR. DEAN: Okay, good.

Can you give us some idea - I know lots of times there are terms, like loans and term loans and investments and so on - how many different types of programs or whatever are there in terms of a loan, a term loan investment? How do we signify a difference there?

MR. SKINNER: I will refer to staff again to speak to the specifics of that. I would say to you that the department tries to be as flexible as possible to accommodate corporate entities that are coming forward or individuals who are coming forward that are trying to access funds from the department if we feel there is a good business case to be made there. In terms of formal structures and how many of them we have, I will refer to staff on that and see if you can provide some detail.

MS MALONE: Rita Malone speaking.

We have eleven programs in our tool kit to support small and medium enterprise. Generally, the repayable contributions take the form of a term loan and/or equity and sometimes both. The term loans are generally a leverage of 4 to 1. For example, 20 per cent from the client or other sources and the balance can be for consideration. Equity is a 1 to 1, up to $500,000.

In terms of our suite of programs we also have programs to deal with innovation. Those are companies that are in a pre-commercial stage, and again, the terms and conditions are much the same as I have earlier outlined.

Further, we have contributions under the Ocean Technology Strategy, again designed to advance various components within that strategy. What we do is we look at our suite of programs and coupled with that, of the BDC or ACOA, we try to broker the most applicable suite of programming.

This past year we have also introduced, as part of the suite of programming to support business, a work wage subsidy. Again, we try to introduce that as part of a suite of programming to respond to the clients' needs.

MR. DEAN: Thank you.

Some questions around the Abitibi closure, Mr. Minister, I guess the overall impact of the closure, in particular. Have you been able to qualify that in terms of jobs, the dollar value, the impact, and those kinds of things?

MR. SKINNER: It is my understanding that there were some 700 people affected by the closure. The dollar value of that in terms of salaries, I do not know off the top of my head. My understanding is that they were fairly well paid jobs, and obviously had an impact.

In terms of the impact on the community itself, we saw, initially, significant individual impact. A lot of the work that the task force did in the early months after the closure, although we were charged with one of our responsibilities being economic development, I can tell you it took us a while to get at that because we were dealing with individual issues that people were having. Some people reacted well, if I could use that term, to the loss of their job and were able to transition fairly easy to something else, and there were a number of individuals who found that a very difficult adjustment to make and a very difficult transition to make.

We provided a lot of other complementary services through the task force, the Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment, the Department of Education, and INTRD to those individuals and that took a fairly long time, relatively speaking. We are now at a point, I believe, where I will not say all of those issues and individuals have been addressed, but I am comfortable saying 98 per cent of them have, and there are still a couple who we are dealing with, but we are now much more focused on the economic development, the economic diversification part of the job of the task force versus where we were a year ago.

While we still did that, there were competing interests. There was the social - I will call that - interest and the economic development interest. Today, we have much more time available to focus on the economic development and diversification interest side of that.

I do not know if that helps you.

MR. DEAN: That is good.

I notice Grand Falls is similar to, I guess, Lab City in some ways in types of the structure of a community, a lot of the businesses that are there supply businesses and so on. What has been the impact on those companies? Have they been able to survive or how are they transitioning from –

MR. SKINNER: Again, I can only give it to you from a broad level. Myself, as minister and chair of the task force, I engage with municipal leaders in the area. I have spoken to municipal leaders. There has been negative impact in terms of that supply of business to Abitibi is now gone. So certainly, businesses have been negatively impacted, but the message that I am receiving is that there has not been major shutdowns or major small businesses shutting down because of the Abitibi closure. They have had to readjust. They have had to find other ways of replacing that income that they have lost.

We have helped with one of our programs, the Business Retention and Expansion Program. We initially worked with seventy-five businesses out there to try to help them retain existing business and to help them find other ways of expanding the business that they had. I have talked to Chambers of Commerce and I have to economic development associations. They indicate to me that while they have seen a downturn they have seen it stabilize and they have now seen it start to grow again.

I was at a function this weekend, for instance, where I spoke to a group of pharmacists. Some pharmacists in that room were from the Central Region and I did ask the very question that you just asked. I asked: How has this impacted your business? Initially, they saw a bit of a downturn, but they said that the level of business activity has risen back up again as people sort of, I guess, got adjusted to it or got more confidence that things were going to get better or whatever the case may be. I do not know the reasons why, but it has come back up.

I am not aware of, nor have I been told by any municipal or economic development type associations, that there has been any major closure of businesses out there. Some have struggled a bit, but have been able to work through that and they are now back on a firm footing.

MR. DEAN: Good.

What about the retraining programs? How successful are we with those, with the former workers obviously, and some of the programs we have been able to offer?

MR. SKINNER: There were a number of individuals - and again, I will maybe ask Ms Malone, just to give her a heads up, if she has anything to add here. There were a number of individuals who did seek retraining. I do not have the numbers at my fingertips. The Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment and the Department of Education would have been more tightly in tune with that. Some of those individuals sought training in other areas of the Province and some of them we increased capacity right within the Central Region to be able to provide some training, and people have successfully transitioned to employment.

In terms of specifics on that, I will maybe refer, if I could, to Ms Malone who might have some more information to provide to you on that.

MS MALONE: In the early goings, there were short-term courses and there was fairly a strong uptake. I am talking about MED or Hazmat, those types of things. There were about forty individuals who pursued two to ten weeks to get some added value to their certificates to match with employment opportunities.

There is a bit of a hiatus, although I hasten to add. Virtually, all of the 600 kind of in the mill and the silviculture, one way or the other, have gone through the support mechanisms - some from financial management, some from career planning and the like. So, there was a bit of a hiatus in the middle as people started to see severance come forward and kind of took stock. So, there is probably another 130 or 140 now who are actively pursuing different levels of training.

MR. DEAN: Next question – what about, basically, the towns and municipalities, whatever. Obviously, Grand Falls-Windsor, in particular, would have been receiving a fairly significant grant from Abitibi, so how does that transition work? Does government help out there or what has been the - give us some detail on that problem.

MR. SKINNER: There were grants in lieu of taxes provided by Abitibi to five communities?

OFFICIAL: Yes.

MR. SKINNER: Five communities in total, and the biggest grant would have been to the Town of Grand Falls-Windsor. Government did keep hold of those grants for this past year and did put in a three-year strategy where the grants were given again in years two and three on a declining basis. Am I correct in saying 30 per cent less? Going from memory, I think it was 30 per cent less, and that was committed to for a three-year period. That policy decision was based upon what had happened in Stephenville when the Stephenville mill closed and the same policy was applied to these five towns.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

Can you give us a dollar figure? Is that there somewhere?

MR. SKINNER: Rough number - $900,000 would be inclusive of all five towns and that would be for year one. Obviously, it would decline then in year two and in year three.

MR. DEAN: Yes. Roughly, a 30 per cent decline, is it?

MR. SKINNER: Correct, yes. The rough number would be $900,000.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

A question about government jobs that transferred to that region. Can you give us an update as to what has gone into the region, since Abitibi, over the past year?

MR. SKINNER: I will go from memory, and again I will look to staff to help me here. I know that the Department of Environment and Conservation put, I believe it was, one if not two people out there to deal with some land use planning. We have the home heating rebate and the parental leave staff out there. My understanding is that they are seasonal, if I could use that term, around twenty-odd positions.

We put some money into the College of the North Atlantic from extra programming. I am not sure of the staffing around that; I will leave that to Ms Malone if she has it to tell you. There is one other – the addictions centre I am thinking of. Again, I do not know that exact numbers of that, maybe Ms Malone might be able to provide that and if there is anything else that I forgot, feel free to add it.

MS MALONE: The addiction was around twenty and the College of the North Atlantic build out was seven - in health and social sciences type academic build out.

MR. DEAN: A question on the severance payments to workers, or a couple of questions probably. Can you outline the process that was used for severance payments?

MR. SKINNER: I could, but I probably would not know all of the details, so I am just going to defer it to Ms Malone. She has been much more involved with it and let her tell you the process.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

MS MALONE: Thank you, Minister.

The first order of business was to secure all of the information about the people who were laid off including the mill workers, silviculturists, loggers, as well as the older workers that the minister referenced earlier, and people who were on long-term disability and Workers' Compensation.

We did have the benefit of having a fairly strong relationship with the human resource folk at Abitibi, and we were up and running in terms of discussions with them in the very early stages. All that is to say that between Abitibi Montreal, the Grant Thornton accounting firm that manages the process, as well as the Abitibi HR, we were very easily able to get to a place to verify records in employment, seniority, the history, and their circumstances of the over 790-some that we ended up dealing with.

Silviculturists and loggers were not due severance, so we had to apply the same formula as we did to those mill workers and calculate their severance because, as you know, they are seasonal workers. A process was put in place that every individual was contacted. We had group sessions first in which we all participated and explained about the processes, explained about EI, RRSPs, all of those things that can happen on the financial side. We secured Grant Thornton to deliver the program, but also taking into account their individual financial circumstances and to provide financial counselling as well.

So that process went forward. Individual counselling, individual circumstances calculation, double verification of both employment as well as severance number, allocation over two fiscal accounting years if you could – those types of things – to increase the opportunities to have money in the employees' hands and reduce the tax implications. In May it was announced, it started immediately, and the bulk of it has been completed by December with the exception of the ones that will carry on until their benefit terminates in 2015.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

So the process is fairly complete, I guess, the part that can be completed?

MS MALONE: Yes.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

Did you say the figure that has been allocated so far?

MS MALONE: Forty-three million will take the full program to 2015. There are people who are called the older workers who go back to Abitibi-Price days and that get a monthly stipend, so we have that amount of money in a trust to be administrated on a monthly basis or a bi-monthly.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

Is there a review process or an appeal process for some who have not been – I would assume some have applied and not qualified or whatever the case might be.

MS MALONE: We had a very, very comprehensive framework on the circumstances of the individuals and that was informed by a Minute in Cabinet. We have had a very small number of the individuals who have come back on their circumstances. Mostly we have been able to attend to the issues under the framework that was approved.

MR. DEAN: Okay. Thank you.

MR. SKINNER: If I could (inaudible)-

CHAIR: Minister Skinner.

MR. SKINNER: In terms of everything Ms Malone just indicated to you is quite accurate and correct. There have been, I could count on one hand, I guess, the number of individuals who may have had some question. Because of the relationship that our staff have with the union, in particular, anyone who may have had some questions come through their union. If they have come to my office, then I would speak with Ms Malone and others, and we would do sort of an overview of the situation and try to understand why the decision was made that was made and whether or not there should have been any change in that.

Anybody who feels they have been grieved by this in some way certainly has an opportunity to come forward; some have done that. To date, it has been miniscule numbers. There really has not been any change in what has happened, but we do leave the door open for someone to come forward.

MR. DEAN: Okay. Thank you.

I do not know if Ms Michael has anything else that she would like to -

CHAIR: Ms Michael.

MS MICHAEL: Yes, I do have a couple of more on the department itself. One is sort of a bottom line figure question that I would like to put. I am curious - $43 million, of course, was needed to deal with the whole package with regard to the workers at Abitibi. When I look at the bottom line for the department for the year where the budget was $49.5 million, then the revision, $83.4 million, which indicates that it had to be a revision of about $34 million - correct? The $43 million, which was over and above the budget, is more than the revision.

Does that mean that money had to come from your department's budget towards the $43 million? It looks that way.

MR. SKINNER: No. If I understand you correctly, my answer to your question would be no, there was no money that came from the department budget towards the $43 million. I do not know what the proper terminology is, but it was basically a one-off through the Department of Finance to put that money into our budget.

Our budgetary money would have been in what I would call our normal provision of services. I do not think there was any extra money from the department allocated to that. I am not sure if I am answering your question directly. Maybe the deputy would have some comment for that.

MR. MEADE: I think, Ms Michael, if you want to look at the $49.5 million versus the $83.4 million, why you are seeing in the difference is that the $43 million would-be is included in the $83 million. Your variance is that the department would not have expended the full $49 million. That would be the issue.

MS MICHAEL: So, in doing the difference that is what you are reflecting there?

MR. MEADE: Right.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. I just wanted to make sure because it did not make sense to me to have had money come from the department.

Then, I guess, you may not have had any control over this. I am just curious. It does not matter because it is obviously money from general funds – so it does not matter – but I am still curious why the money was placed with INTRD and not HRLE because it was related directly to the individual workers.

So were you just told that this was going to happen?

OFFICIAL: You drew the short straw.

MR. SKINNER: Yes, we drew the short straw.

MS MICHAEL: The logical place to me would seem to be under HRLE because of what that department does.

MR. SKINNER: I wish you had mentioned that to the Premier earlier.

MS MICHAEL: You would have had less of a headache! Well, he does not listen to me, so it would not have mattered if I had mentioned it or not.

I do have just a few others – not many – on the department just to get a bit more clarification.

3.2.01., Strategic Industries Development, could I just have a little description of what this department does, which would give me a bit more practical information than what you have there in the heading?

MR. SKINNER: That would be things like our Ambassador Program?

MR. McCARTHY: No.

MR. SKINNER: No? GMO?

MR. McCARTHY: (Inaudible).

MR. SKINNER: Okay. I was thinking of a different branch of the department, sorry. So I will ask Mr. McCarthy to give you that so I do not lead you astray.

MS MICHAEL: Okay.

MR. McCARTHY: We are trying to move certain sectors and industries along. One is the craft industry we are working with, manufacturing, and under that we are looking at metal fabrications, boatbuilding, and stuff like that. We are doing sessions around the Province in terms of manufacturing in the sites. We are also doing supplier development sessions around the Province – procurement with the provincial-federal government. We have done a couple with some of the big, private companies and our small business to get more contracts with them. Those are the types of things in that area.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. I will see those details, then, when we get the list of the grants and subsidies. Great, thank you.

I do not need to ask that one because it is generally asked. Under 5.1.01., the advanced technologies and industrial research - when I get the list of grants and subsidies I will find this answer, but I just want to know in general, have any educational institutions come forward to take advantage of the grants under here or are they eligible?

MR. SKINNER: I will ask Mr. Morris to answer that for you.

MR. MORRIS: The answer to your question is yes. Under this group we have two programs that are targeted specifically to educational institutions and not-for-profit organizations in the Province.

MS MICHAEL: Okay.

MR. MORRIS: One program is under what we call the Innovation Strategy, which is called the Innovation Enhancement Program, and that provides 50 per cent grants to educational institutions and not-for-profit organizations, so that is under one program. Then, under our Ocean Technology Strategy, we have sort of a sister program that is targeted at the ocean technology sector specifically and that is called the OceanTech Intelligence Program.

MS MICHAEL: Right.

MR. MORRIS: That again is geared towards the educational institutions in the Province: Memorial University, College of the North Atlantic, the private educational institutions, the Marine Institute, and so on.

MS MICHAEL: Well that is great, thank you. I will see that then in the breakdown when I get the breakdown as well.

When you say 50 per cent with the institutions you mean that it is 50-50 funded. They come up with fifty. Is it 50 per cent –

MR. MORRIS: Yes, with the Innovation Enhancement Program, it is 50 per cent. They come in with 50 per cent and we -

MS MICHAEL: Yes, and you come in with fifty.

MR. MORRIS: Under the Ocean Technology Strategy, we have upped that percentage a little bit, so under the intelligence program the department will provided up to 80 per cent funding and then the proponent, 20 per cent.

MS MICHAEL: May I ask the rationale for the change for the ocean technologies –

MR. MORRIS: Sure, absolutely.

The Innovation Enhancement Program was launched in 2006. Over the course of that program, over the last four years, we have discovered and noticed that some of the proponents that were coming into the program simply were not able to come up with their other 50 per cent. So, when the guidelines for the program under the Ocean Technology Strategy were developed, that was taken into account and we have upped it to 80 per cent.

MS MICHAEL: Thank you.

With regard to the Commercialization Initiatives, "Appropriations provide for commercialization initiatives to assist companies in developing innovative products or services." Have there actually been practical products that have come out from money that you have put into this that you are aware of, or services?

MR. MORRIS: Paul Morris. Yes, there are. This program is designed to help companies that are at the very, very young stage of commercialization. They have a product in mind and they want to bring it to that next stage to get it to market.

Yes, there are examples in the list of grants and so on that we will provide. We can provide some of that information. There are very specific products that have been commercialized that are now being sold locally, nationally and internationally.

MS MICHAEL: It would be great to have that list, thank you; because it would not be called a grant or subsidy, but the list of what has come out of the loans would be great. Thank you very much.

I think that is all I have for the department. I do want to bring up something under the research council but thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

CHAIR: Thank you.

Are there any further questions on the department's Estimates?

Mr. Dean.

MR. DEAN: Just one or two, Mr. Chair. First of all, just a note, we would like to confirm that we would like to - if I can share the information that Lorraine is getting. If we can get that as well, I would appreciate it.

I would just like to ask about the financial assistance programs from the point of view of marketing and how you feel in terms of what the department is doing. Can it do more when it comes to trade and exporting development? It is a tremendous challenge to producers in the Province to try and take something from a local industry to an export. While what we are doing is good, are we able to do more? Are we trying to increase that?

MR. SKINNER: Here we go. I think generally speaking, Mr. Dean, in response to your question about how we are doing in terms of helping our local companies access export markets, the short answer is I think we do a good job. There is always more that can be done. There are a few challenges, and I will ask our ADM to provide you with a bit more detail when I finish.

I will say this to you, there are two challenges that I see. The first challenge is for us as a government to identify those markets that are the ones we should be attacking or entering into because it is a big world out there and you can get lost in space if you try to be all things to all people. It is very important for us to be able to focus on those areas where we feel we have the most potential. A lot of those kinds of decisions are made in consultation with our strategic industries and the sector organizations that we have within the Province who help guide us into the areas that we should be going into.

The second challenge that we have is making sure the companies that we are dealing with are export ready because it is one thing to say I want to export, it is another thing, as you can appreciate, to be on that stage, have somebody sign a piece of paper saying yes, I want it, and then you being able to provide it; in terms of your capacity, in terms of your manufacturing process, in terms of your regulations and certifications that may be required. There is a whole pile of other wax that you need to deal with on that end. I think we do a good job of that. I am hearing good feedback from the marketplace locally, in terms of the people that we are dealing with. As long as we continue to dialogue with them and collaborate with them I think we will continue to share some success.

I always make a point of getting a list of companies that go on some of our trade missions and I always make a point because I have a number of contacts from my own business experience of calling these people up afterwards when the mission is over or even before the mission goes sometimes to see how prepared they are and how much involvement we have had and to get their feedback. Now, we do it as a department. We have a formal structure in place where we gather this information after missions and we do surveys to see how people feel, but I make a point of calling some people myself just to see how things have gone and I get fairly good feedback, I have to say, and I get compliments on the work that our staff do and I pass those on to our staff. So people seem generally pleased and recognize that the department is assisting and providing assistance but cannot do it all for them. They realize there is an onus on themselves.

Maybe if I could, if our ADM of Trade and Export, Ms Hearn, might want to say something to that. I will give her a warning now because I know she is so passionate about it, that she cannot go on forever.

MS HEARN: Scolded before I even begin.

Certainly, I agree with what the minister has said. It is a challenge in Newfoundland and Labrador to be all things to all companies. Obviously, we have a lot of very keen companies with great products to export but they are in various degrees of readiness and choosing the right markets for them to take their first steps in is really important. We have traditionally concentrated on the United States because of some strong ties, culturally and historically, and also of course because of the closeness, but certainly watching the trends internationally we have to start to make some forays into China, India, and Brazil and emerging markets. So we are working hard now internally to look at where we should go and to chart that course, and to help our companies prepare for that.

The idea is not to send a small company with limited marketing experience into China as a first exporting experience. We want to thread that needle but we also want to – and Mr. Dean, you talked about the marketing piece. We want to make sure that we are projecting the right image of the Province and that we are putting our best foot forward. So we are always examining the export markets we are in and hopefully choosing strategically a couple of new markets each year.

Panama might seem like a funny place for Newfoundland and Labrador to be but it is a very direct place in terms of the canal and work that is being done on the canal and some of our strengths. So that would be a market that we have explored in the last couple of years. Certainly, as we look to Southeast Asia we will be looking for alignment for strategic industries. I will be working with my colleagues to make sure that I am informed of where our strengths are and how we can help those companies make the right steps in export markets.

CHAIR: Mr. Dean.

MR. DEAN: Yes, that is it.

CHAIR: Okay.

Any further questions?

Ms Michael.

MS MICHAEL: Yes, under the Research and Development Council –

CHAIR: We have to carry this first.

MS MICHAEL: That is right, sorry. Yes, that is all for the department.

CHAIR: Okay. Any further questions on the department's Estimates?

I will ask the Clerk now to call the subheads.

CLERK: 1.1.01 to 5.1.03 inclusive.

CHAIR: 1.1.01 to 5.1.03. Shall these subheads carry?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, subheads 1.1.01 through 5.1.01 carried.

CHAIR: Shall I report the total carried?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development, total heads, carried.

CHAIR: Shall I report the Estimates of the Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development carried without amendment?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, Estimates of the Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development carried without amendment.

CHAIR: I will ask the Clerk now to call the final subhead. That one is for the Research & Development Corporation.

CLERK: 2.9.01.

CHAIR: 2.9.01. Shall that carry?

Minister, do you have any comment on that?

MR. SKINNER: Again, thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

We do have some officials with us from the Research & Development Corporation. I will just throw it to the members opposite and we will do our best to answer any questions they may have.

CHAIR: Okay.

Ms Michael.

MS MICHAEL: Thank you.

Some of my questions have to do with over expenditures in terms of the revised budget for 2009-2010. Before I ask those questions, I just have a general question as to why there are no Estimates for 2010-2011 quoted here? All I have are zeroes. I know it does say that funding will be provided to the council as an operating grant once its enabling legislation is proclaimed but there still should have been Estimates, shouldn't there?

MR. HUDSON: Geoff Hudson. The Research & Development Corporation is a Crown corporation. All the funding has been provided to the corporation in grants and subsidies. Included in the grants and subsidies is the operating and the program funding for the organization. The money would flow to the Research & Development Corporation through a grants and subsidies vote.

MS MICHAEL: There was a budget last year.

MR. HUDSON: Yes, that is because the Research & Development Corporation was not incorporated or proclaimed until late in the fiscal year. So it operated under Executive Council for about nine months during the fiscal year.

I would just like to point out that for 2009-2010 there was an interim allocation made in anticipation of the proclamation being received early in the year. You see those numbers within the government main objects representing the budgets, what we operated under the Executive Council. Subsequent to proclamation, we operated as a Crown corporation and all of the funding then is provided through grants and subsidies.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. So, it is going to be like Nalcor, for example, and then you would go to their books and go to their reports to get the information. Am I to assume that after this year there is going to be no budget for the council in INTRD? That is what that would mean.

MR. HUDSON: That is correct.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. Then the questions really can only do with what happened. It seems to me that you have already given the explanation, so this may be very short. That is that you only gave interim funding in the budget. Then when you got into operations, then that is when all the revisions were made.

MR. HUDSON: That is correct.

MS MICHAEL: Does that mean that because of the fact it is a Crown corporation that there are no answers to be given to me now, I just have to wait for the report? If I asked a question of why the interim salary was $200,000 up to $670,000, do you have an answer for that?

MR. HUDSON: Yes, I can provide you with an answer.

MS MICHAEL: Okay. Good enough.

MR. SKINNER: (Inaudible).

MS MICHAEL: Pardon?

MR. SKINNER: Any questions that you have today, we will do our best to answer for you today.

MS MICHAEL: Okay, great. Thank you.

Because we have a $470,000 difference from the estimate to the revision.

MR. SKINNER: Go ahead, Geoff.

MR. HUDSON: The $200,000 – the original allocations were an interim for two months. We anticipated that the enabling legislation would pass within a two-month timeframe, however that was deferred. We continued to work on our organizational structure, recruit key employees and gather a board of directors. That was deferred until December. The reason for the discrepancy is that funding was transferred from Grants and Subsidies to those main objects to accommodate us operating until we were proclaimed.

MS MICHAEL: Right. Okay.

Well, then I am going to leave all the line items (inaudible). I think they all come under that, but the bottom line, the Grants and Subsidies, where $22 million was anticipated to be spent but was not spent. Could we have an explanation of why the amount of Grants and Subsidies was so low? You obviously see that as going to be remedied in this year because you have down that there is the potential of $25 million for this year.

MR. HUDSON: That is correct. It was a situation where we were not in a position to roll out our programs until proclamation had occurred, which was December 18. So we were operating strictly administrating some existing funds. We were building the organization and incurring expenses on the operating side only. With respect to that, there were no program funds that were expended in that fiscal year.

MS MICHAEL: Right. I guess the comment I have to make is more of a policy comment. I am not expecting an answer to it unless the minister wants to respond, but with this council having been made a Crown corporation or a Crown agency, it does mean that if we have questions with regard to where they are going with what they are funding, with the research, et cetera, it sort of does not come back here. It does not even come back to the House. I guess it could come back politically to the House in questions, but I have had people from the university who have not been happy with the funding with regard to research that has been turned down by the council. I have a concern about, as an elected member, being able to hold that council accountable with regard to concerns that come, but it does change the whole theme once is was made a Crown agency.

MR. SKINNER: You are correct in terms of the process that will now unfold. The one thing I will say to you that you did not indicate in your remarks is that they do have to table a report to the House of Assembly which will indicate their activities.

MS MICHAEL: Yes.

MR. SKINNER: I would assume then, Ms Michael, at that time you will get an opportunity in the House, if you so wish, to question myself or anyone else related to the activities of the Research and Development Council.

MS MICHAEL: Of course. Great, thank you.

CHAIR: Mr. Dean.

MR. DEAN: Thank you.

I guess my questions would follow along the allocations of funding and so on as well.

What is the process of allocating funding? Who decides who receives it kind of thing?

MR. SKINNER: I will give you a very high level overview and then I will refer to my colleagues here to provide you with more specifics.

The general budget – I will use the figure for round numbers – of $25 million, the budget of the Research and Development Council. As I understand it, there is about $5 million of that that is used for salaries, benefits and the operating of the council itself. Then, there is approximately another $19 million or $20 million that is broken up into two areas.

One area is there is $10 million allocated for IRIF, the Industrial Research and Innovation Fund, I believe it is called – is that the correct name, IRIF? - used to be administered in this department with money that came from the Department of Education. We administered it; that has now all been passed over to the RDC. So that is about $10 million of the $25 million. Then there is just over $9 million – $9.3 million is set aside for RDC initiated activities for them to decide on what they want to do with that money.

As I understand it, IRIF has its own process and its own parameters. I will ask Ms Quinlan to speak to that as well as how they will use the $9.3 million for RDC initiatives. Maybe if she could provide some background on that, that might help answer your question.

MS QUINLAN: As the minister correctly pointed out, we have the Industrial Research and Innovation Fund, which is a $10 million fund that is targeted toward the university, College of the North Atlantic, and other not-for-profit research organizations. We currently do not have any applicants from that third category; it is all primarily between the university and College of the North Atlantic.

That is an application driven fund, so we have three elements of it: ignite, leverage, and collaborative. Ignite is meant to help start new researchers and to attract them to come to the Province. Leverage is meant to match funds from other organizations. So, it could be tri-council funding like Social Sciences Humanities Research Council; NSERC, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; or Canadian Institutes of Health Research; it could also be Canada Foundation for Innovation. The third element is collaborative, IRIF Collaborative. That is to match funding when industry is a partner there. We can go up to $800,000 if industry is willing to fund for research. That is academic research being done at the college or at the university.

We also have commercial programs. They are intended towards industry clients. Currently, we have two industry programs. We have the R&D Vouchers program and the R&D Proof of Concept program. Vouchers will provide up to $15,000 in a non-repayable contribution to an institution. We will pay it on behalf of an industry applicant. A company will come in and they will say that they want to undertake a project, they want to have access to expert researchers and they want to have access to a facility. We will fund that research to occur. We enter a tripartite contract with the contractor and the R&D provider. We provide the funds directly to that R&D provider whether that is the Marine Institute flume tank or something like that.

Proof of Concept goes up to $250,000. It is meant to answer discreet projects. If somebody is carrying out a research and development program and they have come to a stage where they need to demonstrate feasibility or they need to develop a prototype, it is a yes or no, basically, question at that point. We will fund up to $250,000. They have to have a 25 per cent contribution for it. We go through peer review and we have an application process. Everything that we have right now is application driven.

We are going to be developing further industry programs. We will be launching a directed research program at some point in the near future. The directed research side of things is really going to be identifying strategic areas of importance for the economic development of the Province. We are going to identify key areas we would like to encourage companies and academics to research in. That is going to be mostly industry oriented.

We have two other programs that we have recently launched. One is the student ocean research awards. That is a scholarship program that can provide from $5,000 for a diploma to $7,500 for a bachelor's degree for one year of studies, up to $30,000 per year for a post-doctoral or a Ph.D.

We also have an infrastructure call, so you may have seen that. We issued a call for expressions of intent, and that is meant to be a $10 million fund. The expressions of intent are meant to just illicit proposals. We are looking at research tools for one side of it and the other side of it is R&D platforms. The research tools will be going up to $500,000 and the R&D platforms goes from $500,000 to a $5 million project, and we will fund up to 75 per cent of total capital costs.

The expressions of intent just closed recently and we have received a huge number of projects. We have over thirty applications in looking for up to $50 million. There is a huge need in this Province for these types of programs. We are going to do an initial assessment of them and then once we look at those we are going to invite back some other proposals for serious investigation for a call later on in the fall.

MR. DEAN: The governing body of the R&D Corporation, is it the same as the decision-making body in terms of funding?

MR. SKINNER: Is the governing body the same as the decision-making body?

MR. DEAN: Yes, is it the same group or the same body of people who make the decisions in terms of funding?

MR. SKINNER: There is a board of directors. I am assuming that they would be the body. In terms of a governing body, it is the board of directors that the staff and the executive would report to. In terms of the board of directors and the involvement on the funding issue, I will defer to Krista to answer that.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

MS QUINLAN: My understanding of your question is that you are asking how the decisions are taken for funding with respect to our board of directors.

MR. DEAN: Yes, please.

MS QUINLAN: Our board of directors have ultimate responsibility for the governance of the organization. They have approved our programs, they have approved our funding allocations and they have delegated authority up to a certain amount of money for our CEO because they want to be removed from the actual evaluation of everyday projects. They do not want to be looking at the $500,000 application or the $20,000 application.

So, they have approved our processes internally. We have account managers who work with our clients. They make recommendations that are reviewed by a committee internally that incorporate a financial review. We have peer reviews from outside to ensure that the project has technical merits. Then, the recommendations are made to the CEO. The CEO, at this point in time, is the only individual in the management team who has the ability to approve projects. The CEO approves every project up to $800,000. Anything above $800,000 has to go to the board of directors.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

From a promotional point of view, what is the agency doing to, I guess, promote itself, let people know that it is there, its purposes and so on?

MR. SKINNER: Well again, I will defer to staff to give you more detail, Marshall, but I will just say to you that prior to the actual formal structures of the RDC being put to paper, the CEO, Mr. Janes, did extensive consultations throughout the Province, and throughout the country in other places as I understand it, to learn from best practices as to how to build a Research & Development Corporation and how to engage with the local community to ensure that they were participating with you on that because it was important that people in the community be aware that government was looking to stimulate research and development.

There were, as I understand it, a fair number of meetings with individuals, with sectorial organizations, with strategic industries, those kinds of things by Mr. Janes himself. What else has been done since, I will ask staff to maybe fill us in a bit on that.

MR. DEAN: Okay.

MS QUINLAN: Krista Quinlan.

As the minister pointed out, our CEO, Glenn Janes, has undertaken over 200 one-on-one meetings with stakeholders in this Province to identify what is out there in the R&D landscape.

We also conducted stakeholder consultations across the Province. We went to many locations across the Island to determine what our client groups would expect of us as an organization that was prior to bringing in the legislation.

Since that time, we have really been building capacity. We have been really building up until December of 2009 and now we are in more of a delivery mode. We are endeavouring to release every project that we approve. Once we have the signed contract and everything is in place, we know that it is going to be going ahead; we will be issuing press releases to indicate that.

We are working with an agency of record now to help build our profile because now that we have programs to deliver and staff to deliver them, we have something to communicate a little bit more broadly than just soliciting opinions from others. Those are our steps immediately.

MR. DEAN: Okay. Thank you.

CHAIR: Any further questions?

I will ask the Clerk to call the subhead.

CLERK: Subhead 2.9.01.

CHAIR: 2.9.01, shall that carry?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, subhead 2.9.01 carried.

CHAIR: Shall the total carry?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, Research & Development Corporation, total heads, carried.

CHAIR: Shall I report the Estimates for the Research & Development Corporation carried without amendment?

All those in favour, ‘aye'.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Aye.

CHAIR: All those against, ‘nay'.

Carried.

On motion, the Estimates for the Research & Development Corporation carried without amendment.

CHAIR: That concludes our –

MR. SKINNER: Mr. Chair, if I could.

CHAIR: Okay.

MR. SKINNER: Just before we conclude, I would like to thank the members opposite for their questions today and for their time and effort. I appreciate the effort they put in, in being ready for today. A lot of time and energy went in on our side to try to be ready for you.

We do have a list of things that we have gathered. We will cross-check our own list to make sure we have not missed anything. Then, what I will do is I will forward a document to both parties saying here is what we have, if there is anything else let us know and then we will get it out to you.

MR. DEAN: Thank you.

CHAIR: Thank you, sir.

I would like to thank the members of the Committee as well, and the observers, for their attendance, also the minister and his officials and the House of Assembly staff.

Our next meeting is tomorrow afternoon at 6:00 p.m. We will be debating the Estimates for the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.

Now I will ask for a motion to adjourn.

MS MICHAEL: So moved.

CHAIR: It has been moved by Ms Michael that this meeting stand adjourned. It is adjourned until tomorrow.

On motion, the Committee adjourned.