I will start with the easy ones first and that includes the airport. I want to assure Members, and I have tried to assure others, that I'm confident that the levels of base funding we've managed to negotiate will maintain the current level of services that are in place in the nine Arctic A airports which will be transferred, operationally, to us by July 1st. I think it's fair to say that. I think the department has done a bang-up job in making the appropriate arrangements with Transport Canada. I've said on a number of occasions, I don't know whether it's a combination of good management and some luck -- and I frankly don't care at this state of the game -- but it looks reasonably good. I want to assure the honourable Member about that.
When you're in this job and advised by those of greater stature that you have to make cuts, it's a very difficult, difficult task. What I have tried to do in the Department of Transportation is take a look at where the overall money is and cut accordingly. I've said to the honourable Member and to others, that at the present time highway operations are somewhere around $20 million, which is about 42 per cent of our current budget. Highway maintenance is $12.1 million out of the $19.8 million, that's 61 per cent which is allocated to highway maintenance. We allocate a high percentage of the overall budget for road maintenance; therefore, it has to take its appropriate cut, et cetera.
When we were looking at these OPPLAN cutbacks we tried to reflect the cuts accordingly. That's an area where there has been, along with other areas, significant cuts. Unfortunately, to some extent, Mr. Antoine is correct, he's taking a significant hit in his area.
It's also important to point out that the area of Fort Providence to Wrigley and the Liard Valley represents 35 per cent of the highway system, and in our estimates it only carries 10.7 per cent of the highway traffic. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to make these cuts, but unfortunately we do. I don't think we've been unfair. What we've tried to do is cut as equitably as possible. I want to assure him that no monies went from the cuts that he took into other departments or into other regions.