Thank you, Madam Chair. Okay, what I was hoping to ask from the Minister is she mentioned that this motion is double the MOU that the -- that ECE has with the college. I would have liked to know that number.

And the other question that I would have liked to have brought to the Minister is what, in fact, is her intention for dealing with this problem that Aurora College created for both us and themselves in the sense that we suddenly found out, you know, as the budget was already printed and hot of the presses that we have a fairly significant pot of money with no intended purpose and no plan behind it.

And so I do sympathize with the intent of the motion in the sense that it sends a clear message that you don't get to just cut things away from the communities without talking to the Minister, talking to MLAs, and discussing what the plan is going to be going forward so we can all understand what's happening. And I think -- I spoke to this in a Member's statement when the news first came out that I really am hoping to see better coordination between the Minister and between the college because it just seems like right now that collaboration that needs to be happening between the two entities that are responsible for the college just doesn't seem to be happening. And I understand that there is decision-making authority with the college, but the Minister needs to be involved in what's going on as well.

And so what I'm hoping for is to see a plan come forward, a plan come forward for what's going to be done with the CLCs -- we haven't seen that -- and a plan for, you know, what is going to happen with this funding. Because right now the college just gets to sit on it as far as we know, and we haven't heard a plan from the Minister that she's pulling a certain amount of funding away, and so we're left not really knowing what's happening with the money.

A couple of Members have noted that, you know, if a plan were to come forward or some of the items that were noted by the Minister for ECE and the Minister for Finance that it is possible to bring sups forward for those things. If we wanted to -- if we wanted to simply support staff through the notice period, if we wanted to have a fullblown plan for how the CLCs are going to be dealt with. So I think there are opportunities that the department can bring ideas forward to us, bring them forward for debate. We'll discuss them, we can approve the funding at that time. But as of right now, there isn't a plan for what to do with this money.

To the motion itself, I mean, I think the -- I have a few difficulties with it. I would have much preferred that the motion came forward in such a way that deleted this out of the Aurora College line item in the budget. Unfortunately, the motion didn't come forward at that time. It's just come forward as a general cut from the department. So that leaves us in the position where money is being cut from the department but, technically, we have no idea where that cut will be implemented or how. That's not stated in the motion itself. And so it is a general cut to the department that we're doing with the hope that in good faith the Minister will pull this from Aurora College for now and set about creating a plan and coming forward with a supplementary estimate.

The uncertainty that that creates is certainly not the most desirable effect. I would have preferred, I think somewhere along the lines of one of my previous colleagues, that this was simply cut from the Aurora College line item and left in ECE in order to indicate that, you know, some of the Members that spoke, or at least one of the Members that spoke, spoke to taking this money and doing all sorts of other things with it. Well, I don't think that's the intent of everybody here. It certainly wouldn't be my intent. The idea is that this be used for adult learning, literacy, CLC operation, those various things. So to take it away in a general sense and then just say, well, we need to do better things with the money. Well, hold on a sec, that's a very different conversation.

For those reasons, for the uncertainty that this creates and the uncertainty about what the motion actually means, I'm not comfortable supporting it. Thank you, Madam Chair.