Mr. Chairman, I will speak to part of this and then ask Mr. Vician to give more detail, particularly on the staff training. We are quite proud of the amount of effort and our success on staff training. I don't want to leave the impression that we aren't doing a lot because I think we are doing a tremendous amount for people in the department. First of all, on the apprenticeship training we agree with the Member, Mr. Chairman, that we have to find ways of making our apprenticeship trades training more accessible to people in the small communities. The Department of Education, Culture and Employment have recently told us that they are reviewing the Public Service Career Training Program in order to try to make it more friendly to the people in the small communities. Probably in the small communities, we will have to have individuals who would be willing to do some of their apprenticeship training in the small community and then maybe go into a regional centre to finish off the training or take pieces that they may not be able to get, experience, in a small community. So there would be some movement back and forth. We agree with the Member. We are working on ensuring that at least in a situation like Fort Providence, we are able to do something there.
The current situation in Fort Providence is that Education, Culture and Employment have agreed to pick up 50 percent of the salary, the cost. We would have to see if we can identify something on our side as well.
On the signs, because of recommendations, or as a result of recommendations from the committee, we are in the process of reviewing our signs and some of the sizes and locations and so on. So we are in the middle of doing that. In terms of the ferry in particular, there is the toll-free line and there is also the Web site. On the Web site is the notification board, but if there are ways to improve that, we certainly want to do it for the convenience of people using the public highway system.
On staff training, I will let Mr. Vician speak to that one. The other one the Member raised has to do with the access road program we have to connect communities to the main highway system. We, too, wish we had more money to complete these projects. Some of them are fairly expensive, but we feel it's a good initiative. In this main estimates proposal, we put forward what we can. We've identified $1 million to go into this program and we've tried to distribute it as fairly as possible to everyone. With that, I will turn it to Mr. Vician to briefly give us an overview of some of the main things we are doing in terms of staff training.