Mr. Speaker, the fact that we’ve had the impact of reductions in personnel…. I’ve said on a number of occasions in this House, in the media — and I know Members were not happy with that, even when I said it at that time — there would be some impact there. When half of your budget deals with compensation and benefits of your workforce, and even if you reduced just program areas, there are people attached to those programs and delivery of them; so there was that impact. We’ve minimized that as much as possible. In fact, some of those who are affected have been contacted for potential redeployment, getting them into the new initiative pieces we will be delivering. So we’re lessening that impact, as well, on that side of it.
When you look it, the scenario was that we went to departments — of the $135 million total reinvestment and direct reductions — based on the size of their budgets. So the larger your budget, the larger portion of the percentage you got from the overall target. That was different from previous years. In previous years a department was just given a flat percentage. We didn’t go that route, and they were told to come and meet their target. A number of departments did not meet their targets. We knew they didn’t align themselves with the priorities of this Assembly. So we’ve not proceeded on quite a number of fronts, but we’ve put more work into the Refocusing Government piece. Again, Hon. Michael Miltenberger will be ready to meet with Members as we prepare for the next stage of our work in budget planning.