Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe that the Member was initially talking about the program Investing in People when he was talking about training programs that he thought were quite effective in his region. The Investing in People and northern skills development program were jointly funded by the Northwest Territories and the federal government, to the tune of $8 million. It was a
two-year project. The federal government only committed to two years, and that program is sunsetted and they have not indicated that they will continue with sharing the funding on it. So recognizing how important those programs are and how successful they've been, one of the initiatives we have included in our budget is some funding to keep that type of program going. Unfortunately, because we don't have the cost sharing with the federal government anymore, we have $2 million in this budget and that's all there is going to it in the next year. So there will be a serious impact on the amount of training, compared to what has happened in the past two years, that we will be able to provide this coming year. In the next fiscal year, it will mean almost a reduction by two-thirds in the amount of training over what we had been providing in the communities throughout the Northwest Territories.
The Member also suggested that we expand in the Inuvik region to handle more of those programs. If we had the money for the training, we could certainly take a look at doing that. It becomes a bit of a problem if we don't have the money to deliver the training.
The Member asked whether the $40 million we've been talking about this afternoon is the same as the $44 million that you see in your budget. The answer is no, it's not. In saying $40 million --the amount that Mr. Enuaraq referred to and that I've been talking about -- we've been rounding off a number which was actually $39.8 million, which was part of the $150 million that Mr. Irwin announced is available in incremental funding for the creation of Nunavut. That's not the same as the $44 million the Member asked about. I think we need to remember that that $39.8 million is spread over four years. That means we're not even talking about $10 million a year.
Can we handle the training? Yes, we can. The amount of third-party work the college has undertaken to now has prepared the colleges to pick up whenever there is extra money available for training. As I have indicated, we are going to see a significant reduction in the amount of money that we have available for training across the Territories because of the sunsetting of the program we were involved in, called Investing in People.
In the last fiscal year, for instance, we spent, between the federal contribution and the GNWT contribution, $6 million in training. The federal government purchased an additional $2 million in training. On top of that, Pathways funding was used to purchase training through the colleges. That $6 million has disappeared. We've managed to replace it with $2 million. The $2.3 million that Human Resources Development Canada was previously spending per year in the Northwest Territories has just disappeared; there's nothing to replace it. Yes, Mr. Chairman, we can certainly put that money to work and we are prepared to deliver the training right away. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.