Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I primarily want to speak to the issue of the shuffling of the funds between the health authorities. I’m sure there are explanations for why these things happen. Let me throw out a couple of examples.

Perhaps a community or health authority doesn’t have any doctors on staff, so maybe Stanton is sending out locums or physicians and that’s showing up on their budget and not on that other health authority’s budget. I’m sure there are some large ticket items which would explain some of this. I have a concern with it if we are not able to provide that kind of information in some level of detail. I’m not talking about every dollar that’s spent, but in large categories how we end up with such a large deficit in one health authority and such large surpluses in another.

Another thing that concerns me is, I mean, Hay River Health Authority ended up with a surplus and we can’t get, you know, $50,000, $60,000 to run a disabled person handy van in Hay River. There are really simple community-based issues and needs and services and programs that are needed that we can’t get any money for, I assume because it wasn’t budgeted for, and yet we end up handing off a surplus of multiple millions of dollars back to the Stanton Hospital and, I guess, to the Beau-Del as well. I’m sure there’s reasonable explanation, but I don’t find the government or the department going out of their way to try and explain that or rationalize that in any kind of way. These are large dollar amounts.

The other thing I’m concerned about is when a health authority operates with an unexplained surplus, it could be vacancies, it could be whatever contributes to that surplus, my concern then is in the next year’s budgeting process that that previous year’s budget becomes the benchmark for what they need to operate in the following fiscal year. That kind of worries me, too, because it could be something extraordinary that caused that surplus for that one year.

I think that the reporting needs to be, well, needs to rationalize the need for this kind of millions of dollars shuffling around between health authorities in the form of a supplementary appropriation. I’d like the Minister’s comments on that.