Thank you, Madam Chair. I, too, wanted to put a little bit of a focus on the survey and the conference items there. While they were contained in a briefing that committee got, Madam Chair, I don't recall the details myself. So this is not a surprise in here, but I think it would be, it's not very often that money is attached to the descriptions of these things that committee hears about. That comes up now and we're looking at $75,000, for instance, for the survey and I believe Mr. Handley told us that this would cover 750 people. So in one sense it boils down to $100 a person to do a survey. Without knowing the depth or the scope or the methodology, I don't know if that's good value or not.
I would, I guess, make a similar comment about a conference; $120,000 for 120 people is a thousand dollars a person. Madam Chair, good research, well conducted, has great value, and I think the same kind of thing can be said for conferences and meetings. When they're well focussed, they have a good objective and everyone is well prepared. They can, indeed, make consensus and implementing programs very, very successful as opposed to those that aren't. But I think at $200,000 for these two new initiatives, perhaps what committee is questioning here is value for money and wanting to ensure that these are not just efforts to go out and do yet another study health related. The Department of Health, of course, has quite a reputation for doing a lot of studies and conferences too, which I think sometimes are put together as a way of sort of helping some people feel good about what they're doing, but what is the real value to the system, back to the communities and back to the people? Those are the things that I'm challenging in here. I don't want to take this away from the Action Plan on Family Violence, but put a flag on, as I say, making sure we're getting value for money. Because there are tremendous needs on the front lines that even $195,000 could make quite a difference for. Madam Chair.