Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I've been asked a lot of questions lately about revolving funds, and I haven't received a lot of positive response to them from the department, from their experts, and there's a number of reasons for that. One of them is if you start to put money into the revolving fund, well for one, if it sits in a revolving fund, it doesn't actually get appropriated and approved in the House. So in terms of being able to maintain control over what the spending actually is by the government, the minute it goes off into a revolving fund it doesn't get approved here. And I would be, you know, remiss as the department -- Minister of Finance for the government to say we shouldn't be appropriating our money here at this Chamber in this process.
Another challenge is that if you put the money in the revolving fund and it's a certain amount but it's not enough, again it's more difficult to necessarily draw from other sources as opposed to the consolidated revenue fund, which is the ultimate bank account of the Government of the Northwest Territories, which is where all the money comes from. So if there's a program or service that starts to be in greater need or become a greater priority as we have seen priorities evolve over the life of the Assembly, it's easy to adjust, again, in the course of where we spend and how we spend if it's part of that overall budgeting process.
And the last comment on this, more specific to the question, Madam Chair, is the addictions side of this issue really is a health and social services area of expertise. The departments did work together because we had, of course, the Liquor Act work going on and the development of the alcohol and addictions strategy happening. So the two leads on that were meeting regularly and I understand were trying to make their work at least not be contradictory one to the other. Thank you.