Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I am quite conversant with the details. I have spent a significant amount of time with the authorities, with the board chairs, with the department on this particular issue. The accumulated deficit of the Stanton Board as of March 31st, 2001, was $1,766,207. The 40 percent accumulated deficit, their share, was $706,483.

This year, the projected surplus at the end of 2001-2002 is $584,358. Stanton, on a budget of $54 million, has to absorb $122,125, which is not an insurmountable task. The folks have been working to take the steps necessary to adjust and they are doing that. The numbers I have indicate that this is not going to jeopardize the programs. This is not done without thought, consideration and attention to detail. We have taken the steps that are necessary to resolve this issue. I will put the plans on the table to demonstrate that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Minister's answer. I would like to be able to accept that now the hospital will have a surplus of $584,000 and they can eat the deficit from within and they only have to put up $132,000, which may be, I do not know, a couple of nurses or something. There is something very wrong with this picture.

I mean, they look very nice in numbers, but given what is going on, I would think the Minister and the hospital administration are negligent to be able to be finding a surplus of $600,000, given that they are not able to staff the facility. They cannot keep the ICU unit open because they do not have enough staff. They are going to close the surgery because they do not have enough nurses. What kind of operation are we running?

I really have a hard time seeing all of these contradictions here. If you go to Tim Horton's, I daily get accosted by nurses and health care workers who say the packages are not competitive, they do not have enough staff, they do not want anymore overtime. The closure of the ICU means the new internist they have hired after two years of searching will have no facility to work in.

Now I am being told the hospital has somehow squeezed a $600,000 surplus. This does not make any sense. I asked for a number. You gave me the number and now I am not happy with the number, but we have to go outside of the box. What is really going on here? How was the board able to come up with a $600,000 surplus? Does the Minister know that?

I would agree with the Member. She is hard to please. I have committed to put the deficit reduction plans on the table once they are complete. The Social Programs Committee has asked for a briefing, and we will give them a full briefing. We will walk through all of the information they need. We will give them the numbers and we will hopefully demonstrate to them that this process has done what it intended to do.

The Member and I can sit here all night and she is not going to be happy. She throws around terms like negligence, which I think is very serious. Stanton is in fact run by very many dedicated people. It has a good board. They work long and hard to provide a very high class service to the people of the Northwest Territories. Like every other part of the system, they are struggling with resource problems, but in my opinion, we are doing it successfully. Maybe not to the satisfaction of all the Members. We have also been told by some of the Members here "Do not come back. Clean up this debt and live within your costs." We are struggling to do that and this is part of the process. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a question on the $226,000 to renovate a government-owned building into a duplex. It seems that we have just passed our budget for the Housing Corporation, along with all the other departments, and there is a fair sum of money there. Why would this one specifically be coming back in this forum? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The reason this was coming forward is because it was an emergency situation. We had to deal with staff housing needs, particularly for teachers, so it had to be done in urgency. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So this is staff housing that you are building then? Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, this is housing that is currently, to the best of my knowledge, rented by staff. The crisis that we had to respond to last year was because of a shortage of housing, I believe it was for teachers. This is not designated as staff housing, as such. Thank you.