Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’d like to just follow up on the last question from my colleague to my right. I fully support employee recognition programs. I think there’s a lot of value in them. But there are many ways of recognizing employees, and I have to agree with Mr. Beaulieu; I don’t think the Premier’s awards are sought after. I don’t think they’re high on many employees’ lists of coveted awards. So I would agree that probably ought to be dropped, and if necessary, if you want to keep the money, put it into other methods of recognizing employees.
There are a couple of things I’d like to ask. It’s been mentioned; we’ve talked about human resource planning, and I sense the department doesn’t orchestrate human resource planning, but it does indicate they support human resource planning for various departments. I’d like to ask some questions about the costs that are involved in hiring local nurses. I think it’s well recognized — it’s been mentioned by other Members — that we pay, it seems, an exorbitant amount of money to provide enough nurses in our health centres, in our hospitals. Many of them are not hired on a permanent basis. They fly in; they fly out. We pay their costs in pretty much every area. I’d like to know whether or not the department has worked with the health boards, the various health authorities, to try and increase the pool of float nurses and what sorts of efforts the department has put into trying to reduce the costs for locum nurses at all health authorities.