Thank you, Minister.
As you know, there's been a lot of hubbub in the media lately about assisted human reproduction and your new board and things like that. I'll not go into the details of that, because I actually think the media is off base. There's nothing to manage yet, as you know, because there are no regulations implementing the act, except one small section.
But it seems to me--and I think we talked about this with you the last time you came--it's taking a tremendously long time to get these regulations going. It seems to me we should be hiring extra people to do this work, because there's confusion out there amongst the providers, the patients, and the people who say they belong to the industry--that is, agents and lawyers, etc.--with the lack of regulations.
One would think there should be some impetus to get this done more quickly than is planned, but I notice that on page 27 it's $3.1 million this year, $1.5 million next year, $1.5 million the year after, and scarier to me is the fact that there are 25 full-time equivalents assigned to this task this year, which is reduced to nine next year and nine the year after, even though your long-range plan doesn't show the job being finished for a few years yet.
How do you explain shrinking the staff who are charged with this responsibility, while there's confusion out there, and shrinking the money they have to work with, and then making an announcement about who the board members are? That's like somebody who's starting a company in five years saying they've named their board. For what?