Thank you. The Department of Municipal and Community Affairs is reviewing and updating municipal legislation in the Northwest Territories. The department submitted a report on municipal legislative review in December of 1998. That is what we are working on. The report included recommendations to expand bylaw making and corporate powers. The recommendations also speak to streamlining procedures, as well as reducing liability exposure. There are instructions in the report outlining detailed drafting instructions that could form the basis of the new legislation. That is, in a nut shell, what we are going to be proceeding on.

Furthermore, there is a Dogrib community government legislation that we have to start working on, which will legislate changes to meet or comply with self-government agreements once that is reached. I will just leave it at that for now. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, we do not think there is going to be any changes to what the honourable Member is saying. However, I want to say that we are meeting and continuing to meet with the NWTAM to review this. We will be doing this in July in meetings with the NWTAM, just firming up what we intend to do here. If it is a concern to the honourable Member, perhaps we could raise this issue with them at that time. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, we are not contemplating any changes in that regard. Thank you.

Agreed.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask the deputy minister to provide this information. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This particular unit has a couple of responsibilities. One is to provide a certain level of financial expertise to communities who may be considering borrowing or may be considering financial changes in some way. They also assist communities who may be dealing with financial trouble by going in and helping them develop recovery plans. In some cases, they go in and help them straighten up their books. In some cases, they help them decide on what kinds of positions they need to fill.

Another important function in this particular division is working, if you will, on an accountability or reporting mechanism. We pick four or five important variables of financial accountability that would be easy for the communities to measure on an ongoing basis, such as cash balance versus their accounts payable. We then add some very simple, basic trends that we could monitor rather than going just by the audit that we see once a year, by getting this information on a more ongoing basis, every quarter or every six months. We are working on a set of guidelines and parameters, but we still need to have a fair level of consultation before we can just implement that because the communities have to be able to gather the information easily. We do not want to make an administrative burden out of this. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, it is starting to expand and it is further expanding. We have just finished publishing an analysis based on the audits of trends in the various communities and financial problems or skills that they have, in the process of providing that back to the communities as feedback. As well, when we get involved in helping or assisting a community in terms of working out its specific problems, that may take two days. In some cases, it may take several weeks of both regional time as well as people out of headquarters with a higher level of accounting expertise to go in and help them.