Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I guess first and foremost is one for retention side, is our remuneration package we have available for our nursing staff as well as for staff overall government-wide. We've always been challenged since the days of the 13th Assembly where we reduced our expenditures on that side of the scale when we removed the Housing Assistance Program as well as the VTA or

the vacation travel allowance packages. But we've been quite competitive on the salaries side with other jurisdictions. That will always remain a challenge when you look at the actual cost of living in many of our communities. So it's something we're going to have to continue to focus on.

But when you talk about long-term, and we're talking not next year but 10, 15 years out, trying to look that far down the road. The idea, as we've talked about, is having as many northerners trained and hired and working in our facilities than the need for recruiting from other jurisdictions becomes less and less. Meantime we're going to have to continue to do that and look at how we can fill those positions. At one point agency nurses were the tool that could be used to ensure we provided an adequate level of service. In fact, that was worked to a certain degree maybe too well, because now we're starting to actually fill beyond emergency level services and that's something we've worked with the health authorities on, is to ensure we're filling what needs to be filled. But we have other areas that we're working on, and the community health nurse development program is the next sort of stage where we take nurse graduates, give them the additional training and put them into these communities, as well as our nurse practitioner program. That is another one of those areas where we take the more experienced nurses and give them even more experience so that they can work in the smaller facilities and provide a higher level of service to people in the communities.

It's going to be a challenge, especially when you look at the age groupings out there. There's a large contingent of nurses getting close to the retirement years, and that will be a challenge for all jurisdictions to address that. That's why a lot of focus and emphasis is on the nurse graduate program and developing young nurses from our regions and communities to then hopefully work in our communities as we proceed. Thank you.