Thank you, Madam Chair. Section 33(1) of the Financial Administration Act outlines the rules for a special warrant. First of all, the expenditure has to be urgently required. The expenditure has to be in the public interest, and there is no or insufficient appropriation to incur the expenditure within the department. I guess, Madam Chair, in the best of all worlds, it wouldn't have come back as a special warrant, but, when I went to FMB in May, I went in with two parts to a submission. One part was for the operations of the legal aid office. The other part was for the cost of leasehold improvements. The FMB accepted the submission for the operation and asked that I provide further detail on the costs to fix up the space. So that is why, in the June session, we were able to see the monies, the $266,000, which was approved, and that supplementary appropriation came through without it being a special warrant. The timetable was that we were going to try and have the operation open by this fall. In order to do that, it meant that we had to move quickly to find the space. Because the FMB couldn't consider the revised estimate for the cost of capital improvements before the end of the June session, when I went back to FMB in the summer, it was accepted as a special warrant so that Public Works could advertise an RFP for the space.
It wouldn't be proper for Public Works to be out soliciting proposals for space without the money having been approved for expenditure. So it was felt that it was essential to have the monies approved so that we could seek some space and know that we were going to be able to actually spend the money to fit it up. Thank you, Madam Chair.