Bill 13 Appropriation (Interim Supply) Act, 2011 Debate

March 16, 2011

Mr. Anderson: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I listened with a lot of interest to that last back and forth. A lot of good information there. I know that one of the things I respect about the Member for Edmonton-Centre is that she always wants to know what the de-tails are of these vast amounts of money that we approve in these interim supply acts, these appropriations acts. I don’t think that’s too much for her to ask. Frankly, I think that it’s just basic, you know, transparency and accountability.

There’s a lot of money, a lot of huge dollar amounts, in this act: Municipal Affairs, $100 million; Seniors and Community Sup-ports, $400 million. I don’t even want to see what Health is. What’s Health here? Health, $2.2 billion. Just huge, huge amounts of money.

I think that we could cut down on a lot of the waste in government. Governments are wasteful. Most governments, if not all governments, are wasteful. One of the ways we can cut back on waste is to ensure that we have very transparent and detailed documents of what money is being spent on. When, for example, we have, you know, monies going to movies about the oil sands that paint the oil sands in a bad light that cost the government $50,000, well, those type of things could be eliminated very quickly if there were very detailed numbers in advance of approving that kind of money. I would really like to see more effort in that regard.

Now, I do want to say, though, that there’s no doubt that the books – I’ve compared many of the government of Alberta’s fiscal updates and their fiscal plan and their budget plan that they release at budget. It is better than a lot of provinces, more detailed, and that’s good. That’s a good start, but it isn’t detailed enough.

If we want to get rid of some of the waste and have a real discussion about how to balance the budget without affecting core programs, doing so in a way that we can still build priority infra-structure and so forth, it would be a lot easier to have that debate. The debate would be a lot more thorough and effective if we had a very clear breakdown of all the different expenses, all the different programs, all the different subsets of programs that go on in government, a detailed breakdown of which roads are being paved. Which roads are we planning to pave with this money? Which roads are we planning to widen?

I was talking with a constituent after the budget was introduced by the Treasury Board President. He lives out in an area where they’re expanding the road in rural Alberta. It’s a huge project. It’s expanding highway 9 over to Drumheller, and that goes right through my constituency on its way to Drumheller. He said: “Why on Earth? We had a pretty good road there. Clearly, it needs some upgrading, but why would we do that this year, when we have such a huge deficit number?” And I said, “Well, you know, there’s a line item, billions of dollars on road infrastructure, and that’s kind of all we hear until it’s actually paved. Once you start repaving something, it’s kind of hard to stop, obviously, because they’ve torn up the whole road.” And he said, “Well, why are we doing this when we have a $7 billion cash shortfall and a $3.7 billion deficit?” I forget what the actual number is off the top of my head, $3.7 billion – that’s right – and a $6.2 billion cash short-fall. And there is no good reason.

You know, when all of a sudden the economy tanks and we have this boom-bust cycle, if we had in these types of acts, Bill 13 for example, a detailed list of what was included to Transportation – what’s included in this $160 million of expense, you know, $151 million of which is capital investment? Which roads are we talking about here? Which ones? Can they wait? Can we forgo that project? Can we do without twinning that bridge for another year? In some places you can’t. In some places it’s got to be done right away. In some places you can delay.

I’ll give you an example out of my own constituency. In Airdrie eventually we’re going to need another overpass on the south side. We’re at 43,000 people now. We’re going to be at 75,000 within the next 10 to 15 years. We’re going to need an overpass there, but we can do without it right now. We don’t need it today. We can certainly spread it out and do it, you know, three, four, five, six years from now as we get close to that time when traffic congestion just is about to start to get really tough.

I know we want to plan ahead, and we want to do that. I get that. But when you have a $6.2 billion cash shortfall and a $3.7 billion deficit, you have to delay those things even if it means a little bit of annoyance. That’s just the way it goes. You’ve got to deal with that traffic light for another year instead of having an overpass.

That’s just the way it goes sometimes, whereas in Airdrie – same issue – our need for schools this year, for the last several years, is literally a crisis. They’ve actually partitioned my little boy’s library at Nose Creek elementary in Airdrie and turned it into two classrooms. There’s an hour, essentially, where the kids can go in and get a book. They can’t stay there because there are classes going on, but they can get a book and go out. It’s that serious. I mean, it is nuts. My little guy is in a class of over 30, but there are some classrooms of over 40 kids. It’s just unbelievable. We’ve put on all the portables that the facility can hold. There’s no room for portables anymore on the core. The core can only support so many portables, and we can’t even put any more portables on our schools.

We have this need, and we need that money now, and we’re willing in our community, in Chestermere and Airdrie, to forgo any other planned projects, road paving, anything. We’re ready to forgo that for another year or two years if it would mean getting those schools built.

That’s what I mean by prioritizing, but it’s so hard – so hard – to prioritize when you don’t know what the $151 million under Transportation for capital investment is being spent on. So, you know, we have a debate about all these different programs and all these big numbers, but we don’t really have anything to debate at all. I mean, how do I know it can be deferred under Employment and Immigration? Maybe there’s a program that we could do without this year to help decrease the amount that we’re being asked for. Maybe there’s something in Culture and Community Spirit. Maybe we’re spending too much money on those anti oil sands videos. We can cut those out.

You know, there are all kinds of different areas where if we could see the line by line item in the document here, we’d be able to say: “You know what? We can do without that. Look. We can save $5 million out of that program, or we can save $10 million. We don’t need to twin that road or whatever.” So that’s the biggest frustration I have, and I really would like a response from somebody over there, from the minister, hopefully, on what exact-ly these amounts are for.

Particularly under Transportation, I’d like to know how much of the expense here under capital investment – I’d like to know which pieces of highway this is slated to pave, what projects this is supposed to deal with. Same with Education. I would like to know how much of that $300,000 capital investment – what exact-ly is that for? That would be helpful to know as we go forward.

Anyway, I said I would keep it to only 10 minutes today, so I will, but, you know, I’m trying to have a debate here. I hope somebody from the opposite side can explain to me if there’s any way that in the future we could have more detail on this appropriation bill and what specific projects are under this that we’re paying for when we pass this huge amount of money, a total of $4.9 billion, that we’re approving today. And it’s this thick. That’s what we have approving $4.9 billion. That thick. That’s a very thin piece of paper. Not very helpful.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.