Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses today.
By way of background, I'm the son of a family of more than 250 children, actually, from my family's years of being involved with the Children's Aid Society and foster parents. Subsequent to that I was a nurse in isolated first nations communities across the country, primarily in the great Kenora riding, and have a lot of experience dealing with some of the great agencies that work under some difficult circumstances from time to time, so being involved in the coordinating of care for children under those circumstances is well known to me.
My background goes to Health Canada. In their new model that was implemented under Minister Clement, they developed clusters. The great thing about those clusters is that they allow programs within a certain cluster to give communities the chance to identify certain priorities and perhaps shift funding from one program to another because elements of a program could fit into something else. Aboriginal head start and various prenatal programs are good examples of that.
My understanding of some of the key features of the enhanced prevention-focused approach is that there are indeed streams of funding. As I understand it, they would be operations, prevention, and maintenance, and there appears to be that similar type of flexibility to shift funds from one stream to another.
For the benefit of this committee, could you take the rest of my time to make a brief statement about those three streams, and then describe or expound, if you will, on what it means to be able to shift funds from those and how that affects, I'm sure positively, the priorities of the stakeholders who are involved in the process?
Thank you.