Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The years in the last Assembly, when I sat on the social programs committee and we went through department by department on the informatics strategies, they had a strategy but as I recall, they made very little progress in implementing it.
I am thinking of health in a lot of cases. I am thinking of education with their systems. The ability for departments to communicate and to transfer information. The ability within departments like health where they have, and I have seen them, numbers of different systems within each department that are all different and unconnected, let alone connecting with all the NGOs and non-government agencies the government is tied into.
While I am not necessarily opposed to a plan, we need a plan that is going to go somewhere so you do not have to hand count your numbers. You do not have to double check your numbers. If you want child welfare information on how many kids you have in a group home, you have to route around in filing cabinets.
The deputy said we are spending $10 million a year on information technology. A lot of it was geared to a specific event at a point in time, the year 2000. The reality is, as a government, as a corporation, I think our information systems are wholly inadequate.