MR. SPEAKER: Further petitions?

The hon. the Member for the District of Port de Grave.

MR. BUTLER: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.

My petition reads: To the hon. House of Assembly in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned residents humbly sheweth:

WHEREAS Coley’s Point Primary is a wooden structure built in the early 1960s; and

WHEREUPON the undersigned, your petitioners, humbly pray and call upon the House of Assembly to urge government to take action and proceed with the construction of a new primary school for Coley’s Point.

Mr. Speaker, I have to say, I do not know, it may be thirty or forty petitions I have put forward over a period of time, I did not do any in this session of the House of Assembly because I thought the ones that I put through would get the word through to the powers to be and something would be done. I kept it quiet and thought that would help and we would hear something in the Budget this year, but unfortunately, that did not happen. I will be bringing a few more petitions forward because that school is a wooden structure, as I stated, and over the last two or three years there has been problems there.

I have to say that the minister of the day, of Human Resources, Labour and Employment, when he was CEO of the school board, knows full well the situation and they were pushing very hard for that school to be built. When the consultant’s report was done, the Government House Leader now was the Minister of Education at the time. The report that came down, there were some issues in it that were not prime and proper for the school board system so, as she said in the hon. House of Assembly, the report was shredded. Unfortunately, that new school was shredded with it.

I am calling upon the government, calling upon the Members of the House of Assembly, to see that this issue is brought to the forefront again. Nobody thinks that this is a school that the people need built just to say we have a new school. The population is growing there; there are younger kids coming on to go to that school. To go into this particular facility, this day and age, I think it has to be dealt with.

We know it is not going to be built overnight. We hear of many good reports, whether it is long-term care facilities, other schools or hospitals, it takes some time. At least I thought, this year, there would be some preliminary work done to just say that the groundwork and the design work might have been considered.

Mr. Speaker, having said that, I call upon the hon. House of Assembly to urge government to see what action can be taken this year, maybe there is money in the Budget where they can get the preliminary work started because I can assure you that the people in that area would greatly appreciate it.