Thank you, Madam Chair. In terms of the use of, as the Member calls them, locum nurses nursing staff in the government are all employees of the GNWT. As such, they will primarily be hired as casual employees, not as locums. We haven't used locums as we are today, except for the study in 2004-05 when we started using agency nurses. The agency nurse issue is a fairly recent phenomenon to help us to ensure that none of our nursing stations or basic services would have to be closed.

A few years back, there were situations where nursing stations would have no nurse. Even though we are paying a premium for agencies, and it is a hefty one, at least we are able to provide emergency basic services in our communities. In terms of the agency fees, in 2004-05, the total agency fee, if you will, was $580,632.58. Year to date to the end of November, it was $354,000 to the current year we are in.

If I could, I would just like to comment a bit about this. Stanton used to have their own HR shop just as the department did and all the health authorities and departments. In the consolidation, Stanton staffing and paid staff and those types of employees actually moved to corporate human resources. The staff that managed the recruitment and retention programs were within the department structure. So the people that were in Stanton doing HR services were basically staffing officers, pay and benefits people and that type of function. It was very much frontline, whereas the main recruitment and retention, because we do that as best we can on a system-wide basis to all of the authorities, was coordinated through the department. The staff that were in the department are also part of a consolidation. The agreement that was reached between ourselves and FMBS on the HR consolidation, because, obviously, we are keenly interested in recruitment and retention, is the money and the control of the programs stays with the department, but the expertise, if you will, is within the HR unit because they can draw upon their expertise in other areas to assist us.

That is the general structure of how Stanton services. Stanton, as part of the corporate HR consolidation, has a unit that works in HR and provides services back to Stanton. That includes staffing offices and pay and benefits people. One of the main issues and one of the main reasons why Stanton was actually, at the time, very supportive and still is supportive of a consolidation, is because of a high volume of casual nurses and things like that, and staff turnover. Stanton was experiencing their own problems with processing pay and benefits for employees. We are very anxious to work with the HR section to start addressing that backlog of HR issues. I am pleased to say that, where it is taking a lot of extra time and effort out of the HR staff, we are slowly bringing those issues down. There are still issues. We still hear cases where individuals aren't getting the assistance in a timely fashion, but there are less of those now than there were three years ago. Thank you.