Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I have to apologize. I was conferring on that. Can I have the Member repeat what his question was? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The patients' wait time guarantees in regards to how this will impact or have an impact in our communities in the regions. I know there will be some with the larger communities with the hospitals, but I want to focus on the ones that don't have that type of service in the larger centres, communities that are somewhat left out. I don't want to say left out, but that hang in terms of services. So how is this going to work with our communities in terms of this patient time guarantees for our people in the smaller communities? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the patient wait times guaranteed trust funding, we've worked with the federal government to come up with a plan of how we think in the Northwest Territories would have best impact for front line and that is targeted at some of the smaller community issues. We have difficulty getting nurses into our smaller centres and having the adequate training to go into the smaller centres. So what we've worked on is a number of programs where we see front line being critical to the delivery of health care in the Northwest Territories. One is a Community Health Nurse Development Program and the Nurse Practitioners Program. The Community Health Nurse Development Program is something where we're looking at taking our new graduates out of our Aurora College program or those from southern Canada, if they're willing to come north, and provide them additional education opportunities so that they can have the adequate levels of expertise to go into our communities so that we can have nurses in those communities and not have to rely on agency nurses as we proceed forward. So there's a couple of things there.

Another one is the Nurse Practitioner Program and that will also help in the delivery in our more remote communities as well as our larger centres. That funding is identified to help nurses in the field move to the Nurse Practitioner Program. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The other question I have for the Minister has to do with the $2.5 million for creation and implementation of a Tourism Product Diversification and Marketing Program. I'll ask the Minister in terms of this project here in terms of I guess I'm curious as to where did this come out from in terms of a lot of questions around this here? So I'll ask the Minister in terms of a very brief, very brief summary.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Can I ask Members to stick to the opening remarks of the Minister? It seems like sometimes we get into detail. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, this request has come forward from the Department of ITI. The department itself came forward with its Tourism 2010 plan and it came forward for a request of funding. At that point there was not enough money identified as we felt and we gave it a bit of support. This is intended to increase that as well as deal with some of the impact of the changing environment that the tourism outfitters are working with in the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Yakeleya.

I apologize, Mr. Chair; I got ahead of the boat here so I'm going to leave the rest for details. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Next I have Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to put on record I raised the PeopleSoft issue last week and it's easy to sort of get all wound up and excited about a process and a problem, but when the Minister replied, it was Minister Dent at the time, that they were going back to the original platform sometimes referred to as vanilla, well I wish we would just clearly state for the record the original platform rather than mixing it up with all these odds and sod names.

I got some feedback from a constituent who actually is a government employee who was listening in and I want to say for the record...

Wait until I make the statement. It's a good news statement in the sense that there's some satisfaction that the government is dealing with it and I think our employees are the ones that feel the integrity was not there for some time, but yet the response being the government has chosen to go back to the original program, the one that obviously works. So there is a satisfaction out there that it's being dealt with. I think that also needs to be highlighted here.

Now there are other questions Members are raising and I don't want to underscore the validity of those. They're very important questions, but from my point of view when I was raising it last week it was about what are we doing and what are we doing to go forward, because there was some confusion. So the long and short of it is, I think that point needs to be put on record. I mean if we're going to have a public service that has to have confidence in our system, we better make sure our system works very well for them because we can't abuse that trust. I'd like to think I highlighted very well last week the issue of if our pay and benefits systems is eroded and falls out underneath us, I mean that's a very important fabric of our life. If you can't make that mortgage payment, you can't make that child support payment, all those types of things, you know, your world almost ends to a larger part. No matter how many nice apologies you can get from the Minister of Human Resources, you're still in a whole lot of ugliness until those things get sorted out. Like I say, I just wanted to put on record there was some feedback, the fact that going back to the original program was a satisfactory step from out there. Anyway, I felt it was important to put it on the record. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I, as well, have touched base with folks from my constituency and those that are involved. This program affects government employees and our programming is internal. A lot of the people outside hear it from those that they talk with in passing about the problems within government, computer programs and so on, but I've also heard from those who are involved in this process and feel that once the system is up and running the way it was designed, it will be a much better system. We're hopeful that we can get there and get there soon, but there are issues that we will have to look into and do an evaluation of the whole process from beginning to implement to where it is today. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you. There is just one other area I wouldn't mind highlighting while I have the floor here, which is there was some mention made earlier about some training and wanting to make sure our employees are up to speed on the return to the original program, and if the Minister has some highlights he can point out in this particular area I think that will just sort of end the areas of questioning I have at this time. I just want to make sure that our employees have the proper training to the new PeopleSoft if that's the case or if we're going back to the old version, the new old version, whatever, who wants to look at it as. At the end of the day, I want to make sure our employees are skilled in this area so they are provided practical and proper service for the rest of the public service. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, yes, the training is becoming a more and more important part of the whole program itself. The program that was designed had a training component that could be used, but with the way it was implemented was not a usual function of the platform that we finally put in place. Version 8.9 does have that feature available and we will be using that and working with all departments as has been occurring recently. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Next I have Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Maybe in thinking about the time here, maybe we could go into detail and I can ask specific questions as we move through the detail.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Does committee agree to go into detail?