Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I will be supporting this motion. I also want to acknowledge and recognize that this could take a while. This could take about two years, at least, to complete if they do agree, if the auditor -- Office of the Auditor General does agree to conduct an audit. So this will not be a quick fix or an immediate solution. But I think that it is a tool that would be useful in our toolbox in order to improve a system that desperately needs improvement. So I also recognize that an audit -- a performance audit would usually assess performance against the standards and goals and targets that we have established. And one problem is that in our health care system, we seem to have been struggling in many cases to set those explicit standards or goals or targets. One example being nurse/patient ratios at Stanton hospital, and so it might be hard to assess performance against when we don't know what the goals have been that we're trying to set for ourselves. So I would hope that the Office of the Auditor General might be able to point us to, say, more broadly accepted national standards to help evaluate our performance and look at models of rural health care and primary care used in other remote communities in the country.

I understand that in some ways our system is unique, but we're certainly not the first jurisdiction in the world to have rural health care systems and remote communities. And so I think we do need to look to what other standards are out there and how we stack up.

I would also hope that the Office of the Auditor General could provide some insight into why our health authority and Department of Health and Social Services seems to have had so much trouble in being able to create system plans to really step back and look at the bigger picture, to create the plans and the targets, such as for example, a system workforce plan, and what have been the barriers to actually implementing plans like this. Despite many studies and reports and recommendations produced over the years internally, what have been the barriers preventing those things from coming to light and actually being well utilized and implemented.

With regard to staff retention, one thing I would certainly appreciate is a review of our policies around how and when frontline health care employees can take their annual leave ideally with some indication of how our policies and practices compare to other small health care systems and rurally-based health care systems in the country. We cannot surely be the first ones to confront these challenges of how to ensure staff can get the full leave that they're entitled to when we have limited staff and small systems.

I would also appreciate an evaluation of the extent to which exit interviews are implemented, so when staff do decide to leave, the rate at which we're actually conducting the exit interviews and the extent to which the insights gained through those interviews lead to changes to prevent other staff from leaving where possible. I understand that there will always be cases where people need to leave for personal reasons, family reasons, whatever it is. But if we're seeing patterns of preventible reasons that people are leaving, that those could be used to improve the system to improve staff retention.

Now, we've all been talking this week about how we're establishing a new health care system sustainability unit with the limited resources that we do have, and that has a number of years of work ahead. So my hope is that the work of the Office of the Auditor General could dovetail with that work. It could help raise some flags, identify areas for that unit to focus on, and ideally help to make the work of the new health care system sustainability unit more focused and more efficient because, you know, they have a lot of things to try to sift through and understand, a lot of previous documents and data, and so anything that the Office of the Auditor General could do to help point towards things that really raised a lot of questions or concerns might really make the work of that unit more effective.

So with that, I'll just conclude by saying I do support the motion. I'm hopeful that this can help, even though it won't be an immediate or quick fix, and so we do have to continue working on some of the shorter term solutions as well but this could be one of the more medium term -- medium-term steps that we can take to improve the system. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.