Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I appreciate that question. So first just -- I know there's been sort of chatter, if you will, around the idea of a freeze. So we did put out that there would be some -- we wanted departments to engage in fiscal restraint which is not the same necessarily as a freeze and that was -- is likely to probably arise in the discussions over the course of today. But the idea is as we come to the idea of the fiscal year, we are saying -- you know, departments do have budgets. If they are under a certain amount then they can -- you know, for example, if there's an unfunded position and there is funding there, they may be able to utilize funding if it's not restricted. We're saying, look, don't utilize funding. It's not going to lapse. You're not losing your budgets, which sometimes is a narrative that gets out there that people can just use this money that -- before it gets used up, and we're trying to impose more of a rigor around, you know, ensuring that money is, in fact, being used for what this Assembly is approving it for, so for ones, but there's certainly not a freeze per se. As far as mechanisms, so that is -- for starters, that's why we impose the $35 million as a target for the supplementary reserve fully anticipating that we are likely to go over that in the course of any given year because a lot happens in the course of a year that you cannot budget for or that you don't necessarily know what the actual costs may be. The vehicles that we saw were an example of that -- sorry, in the last -- in the infrastructure supplementary appropriation that we just dealt with. So that is one part of it.

Another part, Mr. Chair, is the processes that take place at the financial management board table where you have a process whereby every department who wants to come and says, look, I need a supplementary estimate, has to go through a process of analysis. It includes determining whether or not it's even appropriate, whether it falls within the definition of something that could reasonably have been considered an unforeseen expense. Departments are often turned away and told, no, you're going to have to come back through the budgeting process, the usual process, because what you're asking for isn't unexpected, didn't arise unexpectedly, isn't urgent or essential at this moment. So there certainly are times where they get turned away. So, again, there's that analysis that takes place there.

Last, but not least, Mr. Chair, with respect to health specifically, again, you know, there's significant -- this is frankly one of the most significant fiscal challenges that we are facing. It's such an essential area of services that we provide to the public, and it is 30 percent of our budget, and there are continuous cost overages and significant supplementary estimates here.

So work happening there is two-fold. We do have the health system sustainability unit that's resting within the executive and Indigenous affairs, as well as the public administrator who is doing significant work to try to determine what those right sizing of budgets are, and the two of them will, I'm confident, be coming forward with some suggestions and proposals of how to better budget in a way that provides the services without ending up, for example, here in the cost overage. Thank you