Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement today I talked about NGO funding, multi-year funding. We have a fine group of volunteers in Hay River who went to some amount of work out of a genuine concern for offering services and programs to persons with disabilities in Hay River. We should have multi-year funding. They ended up with funding for one year. The funding was late in coming. There was no discretionary latitude applied to the money that they had received to allow them to re-profile some of those funds for the months that had been lost while they waited for approval.

I realize that we need to have accountability for contribution agreements that we make to NGOs. There needs to be accountability, but we need to find a balance between burdening those NGOs down with endless compiling of statistics, and reporting, and report writing, and application proposal writing, with actually doing the work that they want to do and that is on the front-line helping those people. I can tell you that the program in Hay River has been extremely successful.

I would like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services and Minister responsible for Persons with Disabilities, what can we do in the future to avoid this?