Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess it is always risky for a former Minister to appear to be critical of a former department. I want to say that I do appreciate the challenges the Premier is facing in the current fiscal and political climate. I know that it is quite a different situation than faced even in the last Assembly. Having said that, I was part of this committee report, which I like to think has provided some thoughtful and hopefully constructive criticism of massive changes that have been put in place here and are before us. I would like to summarize them quickly and hopefully without exaggeration.

Personnel is a mere rump of its former self and soon will waste away to almost nothing when the staff housing function is transferred to the Housing Corporation as planned. Finance, and I am talking about the ministry of Finance, not the secretariat to the FMB, has been gutted. The suggestion in our report is that the traditional watchdog role of the department and the Minister of Finance has been thereby diminished.

Massive centralization of government resource management; question about whether checks and balances are still in place, particularly with the Comptroller General and secretary to FMB functions being put in one place imbalance of power amongst Ministers and bureaucrats, super Ministers, super bureaucrats, super DMs and lesser DMs; political communication; filtered bureaucratic power enhanced; those are some of the themes that I think come through in the thoughtful discussion of the changes in the Department of the Executive.

I would like to hear a response. I believe that the Premier had some strong comments to make about the SCOF report when she spoke to some businesswomen in Yellowknife the other day. I would like to hear them here. I would like to hear where we have gone wrong if she thinks we have gone wrong. What was the goal of this reorganization? What outcomes were expected? How will we know if they are successful? Is it working? Will it take some time to see the results? What was driving all these changes? Those are the kinds of issues I would like to see addressed as we discuss this first and most important department of the Government of the Northwest Territories. Thank you.