Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This being early in the fiscal year, I would expect that we haven't used very much yet of our Student Financial Assistance allocation since the budget was only approved to be effective April 1st. Most of the money goes out in September for the rest of the year. We do typically use almost all of the Student Financial Assistance. In fact, many years we have gone over what we put in the budget and have had to reallocate from other budget line items or else come back to the Assembly for an increase in funding. This Assembly has never turned the department down when they needed more funding to put into that line item. I think we do see the importance of funding education.

I think we've also recognized that there is a certain amount of money that we can put into a program. The decision was made that to go to six years' worth of funding was a reasonable allocation. I would certainly be happy to expand on that, but then we would have to be looking at taking money from some other programs or we are going to have to be successful at winning in our arguments with the federal government that we should have access to resource royalties and revenue sharing because we need a new source of revenues to put into important programs like Student Financial Assistance.