Julian Morse

Thank you, Madam Chair. Sorry, I'm just having to go through -- I think that's -- that's it for kind of business plan related questions from me. I'll ask my specifics on the next pages. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And, I mean, I guess what I would say in response to that is that the difficulty is -- I'm not necessarily looking for documents per se. I don't think that staff time is necessarily best spent kind of just producing plans and reports all the time, but the problem is that if we don't know what we're trying to achieve, it's very hard to define for the people trying to achieve it what success is going to look like and what they should be working towards. So I guess I've got to come up with some Member's statements to talk about this a bit more because -- but the bottom...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just give me a sec here to find -- okay. Yeah, I just wanted to note that there doesn't appear to be any substantial growth in this area of the budget, the labour development and standards area generally. However, a number of goals in the business plan, and certainly the mandate of this government, speaks to increasing workforce, and I could go through the process of listing off a bunch but I'll ask questions about business planning in a sec.

Can I just ask the high level question first, you know, how is this division supporting the priorities of this mandate...

Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for those answers. So maybe I'll turn to some of the targets in the business plan. And just want to say, you know, I do appreciate that they've established targets. This is something that I raised during the last review. I guess my comment now is, you know, the targets are still -- I guess vague isn't the right word. But I'll give an example.

So our target for implementation of the post -- for post-secondary is to increase post-secondary students from 569. So having a target like that means that we will achieve our goal if we have 570 students in post...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Sorry, I wave off my wave.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Those are all the questions I have from this section. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. The first thing I'd like to ask about is just, you know, I see some new targets in the business plan, and I want to say first and foremost that I am happy to see those targets. I think that was one of my comments last year is that I felt, you know, we had to actually articulate what we were trying to achieve.

One thing I want to ask about, I mean, the targets are still quite vague. For post-secondary, it just says we want to increase them; it doesn't say how much, so it's -- the target is an increased, but it isn't a target, again, and in some cases...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The next item is just in the top line of the second paragraph there on page 205, compensation and benefits is reducing by about $2 million. Is this, again, a service level cut of any sort, or can the department help us understand what that -- what's associated with that funding decrease. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So it's the department's opinion effectively that this budget would be going up if not for the changes that were made? Nodding heads is good enough for me, Mr. Chair. And I'm out of my time. So thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My apologies, I'm not quite sure I understand what the Minister is telling us there. So this item is not actually being reduced, it's just showing as reduced in the budget? Or can you better explain what's meant by the answer.