Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I believe in the principles and tenets of consensus government. I believe it can work if all Members believe, and I think we have Members that do believe in consensus government. It is by no way, shape, or form perfect. There is no form of government that is perfect.
As a Cabinet Member, there are things that do frustrate me about consensus government, and I will tell you one of the things that annoys me the most. If you were in a party system, you have a platform. You run out on that platform. You say, "over the life of this government, we are going to X, we are going to do Y, we are going to do Z, and we are going to do it first year, second year, third year, fourth year." We have difficulty doing that in this system because we run through business plan processes; budgets are approved every year. You cannot really assume you know what you are going to get in the third or fourth year of this Assembly as far as a budget.
I have done work in the department. We have done work on a number of initiatives that are mandate-driven, and we are ready to roll out, and we are planning to roll out in the fourth year of this Assembly, but I cannot saying we are going to roll that out absolutely because we still have to go through all these processes. I have raised this with my Cabinet colleagues: we need to find a way to be more proactive and say, "hey, this is part of our plan. We are going to do this in the life of this government. We are going to fund it in the life of this government. We know how much it costs, and we are going to get it done," even though it still has to go through some of the planning processes.
It does get awkward because we cannot speak for future years, and that is a frustration of this system. I sure would like to be able to come out and say, "you know what? We are doing X. It's going to happen the fourth year. It's going to be funded, and we are going to make it happen"; but it still has to go through six or seven processes before we get there. I find that frustrating. I am sure others do as well. We want to be proactive. We want to be leaders. We want to get these things done. They do not all happen today, but we should be able to talk about tomorrow, and in this system, it is a little bit more difficult than it would be in a party system.