Thank you, Mr. Chair, just to be consistent with statements or comments that I made during the review of supp one and the review of supp two in the previous budget session, we had talked about the previous supp amount of $25 million, $15 million of that was taken and rolled back into the departments and I believe, and at the time many of my colleagues believed as well, that that was to help the department’s plan so they wouldn’t have to come forward with as many supps, which left $10 million for supps to come forward. Between the first and second supp we had spent $6 million, leaving us with around $3 million. When I go through this, this supp, on the operations expenditure side is $17.88 million, which is significantly higher than the $10 million we started with and $3 million we had left. When I go through it I see a lot of that money is actually a nil effect to the GNWT because money is coming from other sources, but there is still about an $11 million hit against our $3 million that we had available, which actually puts us a long way over what we’d originally allocated for supps for the ‘08-09 fiscal year. So I’d like the Minister to explain that and talk a little bit more about that, given that we had hoped that we wouldn’t go so high over the supp.

I think the total now with this $11 million is going to be around $18 million, which is less than the $25 million we had in previous years, but it’s really $18 million plus the $15 million that we gave the departments already so that they didn’t have to come back. So we’re talking about $33 million that the supp would have been this year if we hadn’t changed the way we were doing things.

Mostly this statement is as a reminder that we had not wanted to go so high in supps and if we’re going to do this in the future, and I think we’ve already done it or it’s proposed for ‘09-10 to go to this similar sort of supp breakdown, we need to make sure that the departments are actually

thinking about what their future expenditures are going to be. Some of these things in here -- and we’ll talk to them individually as we get to them -- I think could have been predicted. Not all of them I think are surprises. A supp is supposed to be for surprises, things that we can’t plan for. I think as we go through this one in particular, because it’s just so much money, I think we can identify ones that the department should have been able to plan for to some capacity even if it had been a projection. I’d like to not see this much in the way of supps coming in for the ‘09-10 fiscal year, and this is only number three, I know there’s going to be a number four. So we’re even going to be higher by the time we’re done.

So just some comments and I’d like some clarity on what our intentions are with the $10 million supp fund once the Minister does his response to our general comments. Thank you.