Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Whenever we negotiate self-government arrangements, whatever political structure is going to be created by the First Nations, the programs and services that they may eventually be providing, all that will require funding of some sort. Some of that will be coming from the existing programs and services we are currently providing through our governments. However, it is going to cost additional dollars. We know that. We call that incremental costs.
It has been the position of this government that since the responsibility for the incremental costs of implementing self-government, in general, remains an outstanding issue between ourselves and Canada, our position is that the federal government is responsible and has to be responsible for 100 percent of the incremental cost to implement self-government.
In a recent meeting with the Minister of Indian Affairs, Robert Nault, in Vancouver along with the Dogrib leadership and negotiators, the Minister confirmed that the federal government, through DIAND, will pay 100 percent of the incremental costs to implement self-government and the Dogrib Agreement. I made sure, I repeated a number of times to confirm that is the case. They did not indicate that yes, that is his position. Like the honourable Member, I would like to know what it really means, what is the interpretation of this incremental cost of the federal government.
We agreed to work on it. We have people within the Government of the Northwest Territories that have costed out arrangements. We are ready to put them to work to try to deal with this one here. We in the Government of the Northwest Territories believe that a zero-based costing approach is the best method of determining the actual cost of implementing self-government. Yes, we will be transferring funds associated with the delivery of programs and services, as well as any type of savings that we may realize as a result of the new, negotiated self-government arrangements.
Right now, we are directly involved in trilateral negotiations with the federal government, with the Dogribs, to look at the financing agreement, implementing an implementation plan for the negotiations, including the modeling of the different programs and services, and trying to determine the costing for it. There is a significant amount of work that is still yet to be done in that whole financial aspect, specifically with the Dogrib claim, but I think we have agreement to go ahead and try to do some modeling and some costing.
That is, for us, a positive turn of events. Hopefully, if this is a good process to follow, we will use it in other tables that we are involved in. Thank you.