Finance committee  There is no charge or administrative charge or commission or anything like that taken. There is a formula that has been developed by our colleagues in the Department of Finance to determine the appropriate allocation to the provinces of the revenue that we collect. So there is so

Finance committee  In terms of the revenue versus the administration cost--our operating cost--those are two entirely separate calculations. The revenue is one thing, and there is a way the Department of Finance deals with and distributes the revenue. With regard to any incremental costs there migh

Finance committee  This is an extension of the Canada child tax benefit that's administered by the CRA to individual families. But in the instances where there are children in custody--so that's not a family setting, but children in custody--there is a separate piece of legislation that authorizes

Finance committee  At this point in time, we don't have the costs separated out for that particular credit. We assessed our workload requirements on the whole over the three provinces, so at this point in time we don't have a separate cost related to the Nova Scotia affordable living tax credit. B

Finance committee  That's correct. Under the HST regime, the provinces have a certain amount of autonomy, a certain amount of ability to design its aspect of that harmonized tax and to decide to issue credits like this, should they so desire. Under our agreement with the provinces, we will administ

Finance committee  We have yet to establish the requirement for future years with respect to the capital vote. That's something that will be discussed in the context of our 2011-12 main estimates and in future years. That full amount may in fact not be recurring. There is a significant amount of sy

Finance committee  Yes. It is for our computer systems. We have a number of computer systems that need to be modified in order to accommodate the changes and the complexities related to the HST. Those are the investments that, under accounting policy, need to be capitalized and therefore reflected

Finance committee  We have not established our requirement for future years yet. This $3 million is just for 2010-11. That's the actual expenditure in 2010-11. That is the genuine capital investment that we have to make in 2010-11. It doesn't represent the ongoing amount.

Finance committee  Yes. I think the term “horizontal” here is used—and I believe it's defined earlier in the book--when we're talking about initiatives where there is a shared responsibility for the delivery of an initiative among two or three or more departments. In this case here, I think this

Finance committee  There are workload volume issues. There are systems changes that need to be made and so on and so forth, and additional compliance efforts obviously are required.

Finance committee  I think my colleague is correct. For the most part, this initiative did not represent immediate changes for the other provinces, although you will note here that Nova Scotia has introduced, as part of its HST regime, an affordable living tax credit now, which we began implementin