Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the Ministers for a good response to my
questions. My final question would be for the devolution, what funds have you received from Canada to date on this issue here, and a comment to the Minister on the forest suppression needs for funding up front. Mr. Chair…(inaudible)…and I will have to apologize for my ignorance on this. The Minister talked about the aircraft services. Are we entering into new contractual arrangements with them or do we need to have that discussion yet? These funds are advanced. I understand why they need to be there in time for the forest fire season. My understanding is clear on that. I guess these are the types of things that we need to have some further discussions yet. I’m not going to stay too long on that issue here.
I do appreciate the Minister’s response on the nurse practitioners. They are a valuable piece of human resources that we need to have in the Sahtu communities, or the Beaufort-Delta, or Deh Cho, or Tlicho, or wherever we need to have that type of service of these nurse practitioners there. I’ll leave it at that there, and hopefully the Minister can help with these couple of other concerns I had.
I understand that some of the operations within NGOs or the government, they have entered into multi-year funding and contracts. That’s why some of them have to be honoured. We heard for many years that multi-year funding is the way to go with the NGOs, so that’s something that needs to be honoured also. I do think that should happen. The Minister does know about my concerns on these issues here, so thank you for allowing some flexibility on his part to explain it to me.