Finance committee  On the question about the GST, the school board has benefited directly from the GST cut, as I explained. We have proposed a very targeted GST cut, but we are still benefiting from the broad-brush cut the government implemented. So I don't want to be churlish and say that we're no

Finance committee  No, let me be clear. The school board has no official position, and if we asked them, it would probably take us three days to come to a position, but we don't have—

Finance committee  Last night we cut those by $10 million to $14 million; it was very difficult. I know we can all joke about it, but it was very difficult.

Finance committee  The gross budget for this year is larger than the gross budget for last year. However, when the province gives you additional money, they typically earmark it for very specific things such as a new program, a new initiative, or whatever. The wiggle room or the discretionary budge

Finance committee  Your Peterborough school board came out two weeks ago endorsing this GST cut. I don't know if they sent you the letter yet.

Finance committee  It's a slam dunk. Just to be clear, since 1991, school boards have been paying GST. That's a lot of GST. The Canadian School Boards Association has been fighting this for a long time, and I have reams of their submissions to standing committees on this issue, going back several y

Finance committee  The province will claw the money back. My answer to that is that actually they haven't clawed it back. The 1% you've given us, they have not clawed back. I get the argument that it's an exclusive area of provincial jurisdiction, that K to 12 is a provincial jurisdiction. So I say

Finance committee  It is a no-brainer.

Finance committee  The board doesn't have a position, although the 1% reduction received to date has saved us about $1.5 million, for which I am very happy. I personally don't support it, but that is a clear reduction for our school board, I agree.

Finance committee  Thank you very much. I'm Bruce Davis with the Toronto District School Board. I'm going to apologize in advance for being cranky and for being a little testy this morning. We were up into the wee hours of the morning to cut $84 million from our school budget, so we could balance