Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member is correct on the process, the program that’s in place and the policy we have with authorities. On the side of deficits, the boards are to address the deficits through their annual plan. With surpluses, they are allowed to put 50 per cent into a reserve fund to offset future deficits. We have two health authorities who have deficits at this point.

I want to say for the record that the deficits have started as late as the year 1999. Since ’98–99 a number of boards have been in and out of deficit. The Government of the Northwest Territories in past supplementary appropriation exercises has paid out half of the debt at that point but had health authorities working to come up with a plan to find the rest of that.

When we found that the deficits were going higher, FMBS had become involved with the Department of Health and Social Services and progressed to the point of doing a zero-based exercise. That exercise was initially to take a snapshot view of how the health authorities were spending their dollars. We started with Stanton, and we’ll be going forward to the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority as well. From that, we’re hoping to gain a better understanding of how the money was being expensed. Was it an area of underfunding, or was it an area of enhancing program delivery that was beyond the mandate of the Department of Health and Social Services and the authorities?

The Department of Health and Social Services has now taken that information under review and has been working with the authorities on coming up with a plan to deal with the expenditures going forward. FMBS has reviewed this scenario of where the authorities are and felt that to start this process and do a proper review, it would not be, as the Member stated, appropriate to burden the existing arrangement with an old debt that’s been collecting and starting to grow.