Thank you, Madam Chair. A few comments on the Minister's opening remarks. I may stray from the opening remarks a bit, but in context of the problems that we face in the health care system, I know that the Minister doesn't have an easy job of trying to address all of the issues that we have, as well as the growing costs that are involved. It is a system that appears to have no end in sight as far as where we are going to go with our programs, and when we are ever going to find solutions. I know this morning at about six o'clock, I drove my daughter to the airport and I was listening to the radio and there was some health professional I think from Vancouver. He was talking about the health care system in Canada as a whole, and what caught my attention about it was he said our health care professionals are lying to us about the programs that we have in place today, and the free health care system across Canada, and we continue to throw more money and more money at the programs that we have in place and there never seems to be any results coming out at the other end. He was saying that within 25 years if we don't change our approach to health care, that there won't be a health care system and it will be too late at that time to even fix. Having said that, he didn't put all of the answers out there either, and I certainly don't have all of them either.
In looking at the health budget for this year I was tempted to go back and look over the comments that we have made over the last four years in health care, and addressing some of the issues that are facing us. The issues don't seem to change, and the problems don't seem to change. One of the things that I noticed in going back over the last four years, I looked at the budget addresses in each of the four years during the 14th Legislative Assembly, and there was a very high emphasis put on early childhood development. We continued to mention that consistently over the four years through the budgets, more money into year two or into year three of the programs of early childhood development. I notice that this time when the budget came out, and even in the Minister's opening remarks, early childhood development is not even mentioned in here, except that we want to give our young people the best start we can in life, and that may be what that was referring to. I would just like to ask the Minister, has there been less of a focus on early childhood development now and more towards this integrated service model that I want to speak of a little bit more after. Is the focus stretching or are we starting to see results of the programs and the millions of dollars that we have put into early childhood development? Are we starting to see some improvement in that area? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.