Madam Chair, I'll try to keep it short. The process the Member describes for water and sewer program administration in the small communities, in particular Rae-Edzo, is exactly what MACA is promoting. It's exactly what we want the community to do, is take it over themselves. I agree with the Member, it's not necessary for Public Works to do the work for them. They can do it themselves, or they can contract it to another contractor. They don't have to use Public Works.
If we go back a little ways, we'll find that Rae had that program. They took over the management of water and sewer in Rae. They did it themselves for years. But they ran into a $400,000 deficit. We bailed them out. MACA bailed them out, and what happened then was that they didn't want to take the management anymore. They signed it back to MACA and we gave it to Public Works. Public Works is actually doing it now for the community, and charging the community back for what it would have cost them to do it themselves. The Member could be right, maybe Public Works is costing them more than they would to do the job themselves. But what we're working with the community now is that we will phase it over to them, and they have agreed to work towards phasing and taking it back, including training people. There's a certain process for training. When they reach that level, building capacity, then we would eventually have them take over the whole process again. That's exactly what we want. Public Works doesn't want to do this if they don't have to. I'm sorry. I suppose I'm speaking as the Minister of Public Works and Services, but I can assure the Member that Public Works does not want to do it if the community wishes to do it themselves.
In relation to the winter road, the ice road outside of Rae, all I can say is MACA is not funding the winter ice road from Yellowknife over to Detah. That's something Transportation does. We don't fund them, as far as I know anyway. So if Rae wants to build a road out like they've done, they have to do it at their own expense. We don't have money for that. We give them money to maintain X number of kilometres of road within the community. If they have a surplus and they want to run their grader or loader out and make a shortcut, that's fine. Obviously they save some cost because of shortcut. Other communities do the same thing. But they don't come back to MACA for more funding, because we can't fund those roads. Well, half of the time they're not there anyway, so... That's the policy we have for those types of situations. Thank you, Madam Chairman.