Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The comments from the Minister of Finance to the interim appropriation bill here, I wanted to clarify that. I wanted to ask, hoping he was asking some of the specifics to the Minister of Health. For example, the Nurse Practitioner Program. We know it’s running. There are going to be graduates this year. This is only an interim appropriation for the operations to continue. I want to ask what plans you have for the nurse practitioners. There are going to be graduates. Is it still a program? Do we wait until business plans? I know some of these things are going to take awhile. I concur with the comments to my colleagues on the senior director positions in HR. After four years we catch it. Why can’t it go through the normal process of the business plans? This is an interim. So it’s a give and take here. That’s what I was hoping to get some responses on.
I understand the Minister is saying that we will make some changes, but some of these things I think are already in the operational plan, some of the details, like the issue with the Executive, devolution. How much money have we received so far from the federal government? Questions like that. The activity with ITI on the explanations for the low level of funding on energy. Some of these programs are sunsetting. Things are happening through this interim appropriation bill. It’s $404 million that we’re approving here.
I think the government needs to be accountable. The transparency needs to be here rather than just saying it’s operations as before. If I could get some answers like why is forest firefighting funding so huge and why everything’s up at front. Those are predictions of the fires that will happen next year. We approve money, sometimes it’s less, sometimes it’s more than what they need.
I guess for myself we want to go through this process and we should be able to answer some of our questions here, other than to put us off and say, well, we’ll do the business plans. I’m not asking for any hard, specific commitments. I know we have a
business planning process. We’re going to have to make changes through the whole Assembly. We’re approving $404 million for three months of operation. We need to have these questions here answered or on notice. I believe the Ministers are taking some of them on notice. There are some things that are going to be changing here. Like I said, the energy initiatives, some of them are sunsetting so that’s going to mean some changes to the way we do our operations.
For me I’d like to have some of these concerns that I just brought up here the last four and a half minutes, five minutes, and see if I’m going to get some answers from the appropriate Ministers.