Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that my message around, "Don't ask for more if you're not taking something out," is at least falling on some receptive ears. Notwithstanding that, Mr. Chair, the comment about the projections and a lack of certainty or clarity around the projections, the way that we come up with the projection of $31.7 million, Mr. Chair, was by looking at the actuals that were spent by and across all departments in the initial response, April, May, June, and I think July, as well, which was in and of itself a bit of a process by having to initially putting up codes and saying to each department, "Please code under this COVID code and try to maintain and identify how much is being spent," and cobbling all that together. That took a bit of effort, and it took a lot of effort on the part of all the departments and then on the Department of Finance to pull that together, to evaluate where all of the costs were coming in and where the spending was being affected in order to have our response to COVID-19.

Once that was done, once those were received, that's how the projections for what then became the COVID secretariat were done. It was based on knowing what we had spent to date under the conditions that we were under, under the Chief Public Health Officer's orders that we were under. Those projections are projections, but they are projections that are fairly accurately based. That said, as far as concern about "the money will just be spent because it's there," Mr. Chair, first of all, I think I've said before that that's not what departments should be doing, ever. Besides which, this is not that kind of situation. I don't think anyone wants to be spending money unnecessarily on COVID-19. Nobody wants COVID-19 in the first place. It's not a situation where the money would then be available to move around within the department, because there is no department here to be moving it around to. There is a very discrete and separate set of functions, which is what we will be reporting on now monthly here to the Members, at the very least, if not to the public on the website, so there is not really anywhere for that money to be squirreled away.

I appreciate the Member's creativity in trying to find a way to save it, but again, this is not something where it's going to sit there and get shuffled off. Also, one last comment, Mr. Chair, is that the money isn't coming from programs and services. It's not coming from municipalities. It is impacting the surplus, the operating surplus, but if it doesn't have to be spent on COVID, then it won't be spent on COVID, period. Thank you, Mr. Chair.