I don’t believe I said that we don’t get any money, I recognize that there certainly are organizations that run programs and that there are contributions from the Department of Health and Social Services, but I am a little concerned that there is no fund for larger centres that is application-based, which I gather that the Small Community Homeless Fund is. I guess I would encourage the department to try and provide some funding at some point, if it is not in this year’s budget, then consider it for next year’s budget. There certainly are needs within all of our communities for homelessness funding and it shouldn’t just be based on operations and maintenance funding for existing shelters and programs.
My last question has to do with the Healthy Choices Framework and the Healthy Choices Program. I want to say that I think it is an excellent program. It is one of the few areas, in my mind, that we have cross-departmental coordination and I think things seem to be coordinated rather well there. Somewhere along the line, a while ago anyway, we received a copy of the Healthy Choices Framework and it was an evaluation framework at that time, it
did not show any evaluation of the program, so my question to the Minister is: has there been an evaluation of the Healthy Choices Framework and, if not, when could we expect to see the results of an evaluation of the program? It has been in place for a couple of years now and I think it is probably due to be evaluated. The evaluation framework we got is really quite detailed and I think it would be a valuable tool to determine whether or not the money we are spending is being well spent. Thank you.