Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to express pretty much the same comments that were expressed earlier by Mr. Abernethy and Mr. Ramsay. I, too, have had great difficulty with the size of this supp as it has come forward. It was my expectation that with departments having a certain amount of money to sort of deal with on their own that it might reduce the amount of the

supplementary appropriations that have come forward and it has not. So I’m a little disappointed in that.

I think philosophically that giving money to the departments up front, giving the $15 million out is a good idea. I think we should continue to do that, but there has to be some change somewhere in either the mentality of departments or in the mentality of us here, similar to what Mr. Ramsay said. Maybe we have to say no once or twice to get people to wake up and recognize that no, you can’t always be asking for money and always get it.

With regards to HR and the two expenditures on this page, at the risk of being repetitive, I feel very much as Mr. Abernethy does and I’m really pleased to hear from Minister McLeod that they’re going to start asking for funding on an annual basis to fund negotiations. It’s my feeling that we ought to be able to at least approximate a certain amount of money that’s going to be required for negotiations in any year when we are doing contract negotiations. If it varies by $100,000 one way or the other, well, that’s to be expected, but we should at least be putting an amount into the budget to indicate that, yes, we are expecting to negotiate, and probably doing it over multi years is better than doing it at any one year in that it may, unlikely, but it may confuse the union as to what kind of money they are maybe going to be able to work with.

So I can accept these expenditures, but I don’t like it. I recognize that there are costs that we have to bear, but I would think that we need to plan better in the future. That’s all. Thank you, Mr. Chair.