Thank you, Madam Chair. I think that the Minister of Finance has already indicated that the Housing Corporation will be coming back in the not-too-distant future to talk about their new mandate, and, perhaps, some reallocation of resources in the long term. But you can't expect that there is going to be, on April 1st, a sudden transfer of the program, and that it can be delivered seamlessly without there being a period for training, and ramping up, of staff. Yes, there is always going to have to be some duplication. We are not talking about seven bodies. We are talking about because of increased workload. We are talking about, for instance in Rae, adding three-quarters of a position, so there will be part-time additions to help the staff there. We are adding some part-time assistance in Whati. We are adding part-time positions basically across the Northwest Territories, because of the increased workload for the income support staff. You can't deliver this much more of a program. We are talking about an increase in the number of clients that the staff will have to see. We are staffed, right now, based on the numbers of people that the staff see. So if you increase the numbers of clients that will go through the offices, we are going to have to staff up to deliver those services.

For the most part, we are not seeing seven people added in one community. We are seeing people added throughout the regions. It is a number of additional part-time positions that are being added, other than the three positions that are being added at headquarters. One of the three positions that we are adding at headquarters is an audit and compliance officer. We are doubling the total money that will be dealt with by income support workers. We have two compliance officers now. With the doubling of funding, we are thinking that we are probably going to have to do more compliance audits, so we are adding one more person.

Whether or not on an ongoing basis, some of the resources come from the Housing Corporation won't change the fact that we have to do the training and get the systems up and running before April 1st. It is not something that you can just move from one day it is being done this way, and the next day it is being done a different way. Members know what sorts of issues you are going to face from your constituents if the program doesn't work right on April 1st. If you really think that the income support worker is going to deliver the program on April 1st without having some experience and training, well, I think you are wrong. I think we are setting this whole thing up to fail. If that is what we are after, then fine, let's not go ahead with the training. But if we want to eventually see the economies that we might see by having a comprehensive and cohesive approach to how we deliver Income Security programs, if we want to bring all of the Income Security programs into one place so we can better plan for them, we have to take this step. This is the first step. Yes, there are some extra costs to implement a new program. It would be impossible to move forward with this without duplicating during some kind of switch-over period. We are talking about that period of time leading up to April 1st. Thank you, Madam Chair.