Thank you, Madam Chair. The whole issue of midwifery, if we put midwives on the ground, we will do it without working with physicians and doctors that are in place now. We will do it without community consultation. We will do it without educational standards for midwives. We will do it without having territorial standards for midwives. These are the things that we want to put in place before we proceed.

We’re going to get the money on April 1st . We think

that, as people working in the system, developing standards in education, setting up other standards territorial-wide, and working with the physicians on the role of the midwives in the whole system are important. We think it’s important to do some community consultation. We don’t really think we should rush into this. We don’t really understand why there is an insistence that we rush into this and hire midwives immediately. We think that we want to develop a program that will have long-term success, not something that we want to put in place and then try to make it work as we are running through the system.

Right now we have an opportunity to what I think is put a good complementary system in place for midwives that work with the physicians in the system. We seem to be getting a lot of pressure to be able to just hire midwives. We need an opportunity to go through the system, not slowly but in a reasonable time in order to make good decisions with this.

On the health care cards, we are trying to improve the system. We recognize that a few people have had issues in the system as we change the way we are going about renewing health care cards. Instead of sending out forms to individuals, we’re sending out postcards, giving people personal responsibility to fill out the forms and get them into the office and then a new health care card would be provided. We recognize that there are some glitches in the system and that there is some fine-tuning that is needed. We have a systems navigator in place at Health and Social Services that can work with individuals that have issues with health care cards. There is a 1-800 number. If there is an issue with communicating that to people, that we have someone that’s prepared to, in the system, help them with getting their health care cards in time, then we can send that information. We can communicate that out to the general public.

The majority of the time it is not an issue, but as issues come up in the system, then yes, we hope to

address the issues. We are doing health care cards expiring, I think, over the next two years. We have indicated that we thought there might be about 3,000 per month, but it could be less than that, as well, depending on how many of them are expiring next year as opposed to expiring this year.