Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to make some comments again on the funding of the accumulated deficits under program delivery support, the $3,483,000 to the various boards. There are a couple of boards who were able to manage their funds fairly well in this last fiscal year. I would have to assume the Deh Cho board and the Yellowknife board, I see that they are not in there, but we have debated this back and forth with the Minister. He insists that this 60/40 funding arrangement, where we are willing to erase 60 percent of these figures, is not arbitrary -- I think if you look at Hansard from yesterday, "not totally arbitrary" -- but in fact, he had consultations with the boards and these were agreed upon and arrived-at figures.

I would suggest that although there was consultation and there was agreement and they arrived at some conclusions, that still does not convince me that this is not arbitrary. I cannot imagine that all of the boards had equally justified overexpenditures to the tune of 60 percent being justified, 40 percent not justified. The Minister has assured us that there will be an accountability framework in place going forward. We do not want to see this again. We are going to do everything we can to ensure this does not happen again, but I think the point still needs to be made.

I assume the Minister made a decision that he did not want to continue to fight this issue for months going forward, and he wanted to come to some sort of resolution, wipe the slate clean and start fresh. I see this as a chronic problem in this department over the past few years. That is, the boards end up with these cost pressures and end up spending more than their budgets allow them to. We have not come up with any concrete way to deal with this up to this point.

We are going to suggest that we are going to force boards to come up with deficit reduction plans. We have been doing that all along. The result remains that these boards really have no way to slash services and I do not think we want to see them do that. Their only choice to come up with any sort of deficit reduction plan, really, is to go to the department for a bail out. We use this bail out with all of its negative connotations, but I cannot imagine how else they are really supposed to recover these budgets and I think the boards are aware of this.

It seems to me that we do not have the ability to ensure these funds are properly managed. I am sure that in some cases they are and in some cases they are not, as with everything. The Minister has not done much to assure us that this is all changing and that this is where it stops. We have done this for the last time. I am hoping that possibly Minister Handley will refer the question to Minister Miltenberger and we can get some sort of assurance from him that this is the absolute last time.