Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In regard to the community initiatives of community empowerment or taking over responsibilities from this government, it is a good initiative. At the end of the day, there always seems to be a lack of resources in the communities which before, if the government had the responsibility, they would have monies available for housing for staff and to ensure the person is highly qualified. Basically, there was certain benefits that came along with those positions. Also, they would have the resources to ensure they would have O and M funds available. They would have capital dollars available, so they could purchase equipment to carry out their functions. In regard to communities, one thing that seems to really be lacking is when they take on these responsibilities, a lot of these add ons are taken away from these community initiatives where the individuals or the community has a portion of a salary for a person's position. A lot of times the individuals have to find alternative office space or basically the community has to subsidize these individuals when they go to work. A lot of these positions are part-time. Before, when the government had it, these were full-time positions. When you talk about the whole area of monitoring and evaluation of community initiatives, do you also allow the opportunity of the communities to identify the faults of these initiatives they have taken on? Such as, not having the adequate funding or not having the adequate training for the individuals who have put themselves in those positions.
One of the concerns I have is that in regard to negotiating claims agreements where we also negotiated implementation agreements which identified the resources that were going to be used to ensure that these dollars were there so that when the boards were up and running the different functions that they had were all spelled out in black and white. You knew exactly how much money was going to be there for the rent, for the phone, for the individual's position, the benefits and everything. In these cases it seemed like you just take on the responsibility with one function which is basically the human resource side, but you do not look at the delivery side also in regard to having to process the applications or ensure that there is adequate training there. You are making sure that you have the money in your funds for benefits such as pension funds, CPP, UIC or all these other functions which add up to the different organizations that take these things on. When you do your evaluations, do you look at all these other functions that come along and do the communities have the ability to go back and renegotiate, identify those problem areas and increase the funds in those different sectors?