Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The community access road program is a program that is an essential economic boost to the smaller communities who use this program to build up trails and roads. In other words, you're putting $75,000 into the local economy. I think that this government, without these little programs where the money is being used for an economic boost to our communities, we're spending a lot more than the $100,000 we're going to save here. I think if you figure out the amounts of money we're expending in social expenditures in our communities where we're going through some of the amounts we've spent in the communities on social services and other dollars by way of income support and other things, that you can see that the $100,000... This program was basically established to assist communities building small scale infrastructure. We're not talking about $1.3 million roads in communities, but we're only talking $75,000 a year, and I feel that this is a program that communities have been fighting for to try to find a program that they know is not a lot of money, but it will give them some economic boost each year to do little projects, such as an access road to a gravel source, or an access road to a particular lake. I think for cutting $100,000 which is more than 10 percent in the other areas, I think if you look at the cost to government... I'll use an example in regard to the service costs that we spent in the communities. In regard to social assistance in a lot of our communities where we're spending well in excess of $100,000 in regard to a community like Sachs Harbour. We're talking about communities like Tsiigehtchic where we spent somewhere in the area of $200,000. But for $75,000 putting it into that economy will give some people some work, will give them some small scale infrastructure. But for communities, those little projects really make a difference to somebody who is unemployed or is on income support. We as a government should be promoting these programs and offering communities these types of projects to give them that little boost in their economy. So I'd like to ask the Minister again on this one, will you consider looking at an alternative way of ensuring those dollars are there? At the end of the year if this money lapses, well, it's going to lapse, it's going to go back into the general revenues anyway. But at least having the core amount of $837,000 for the number of projects we got...
Just last year, the committee made a recommendation to this House, through our business plan reviews, increasing that amount which was previously $50,000 per year to a community for a project, a community access road project. But what we see in looking at the projects that have been allocated, for $50,000 you can't do much by way of hauling gravel or trying to fix up a road. So we changed the criteria to offer $75,000 per community for this community access road, up to a maximum of $450,000. So that's the extent of the project. This will only meet the needs of 10 communities. So for us to take $100,000 out of the project, which we're really only looking at offering this project to a lot fewer communities who want to access it. So I'd like to ask the Minister could you consider those projects that we have put in place to stimulate our communities remain so that those dollar could be a way of instead of paying social assistance, that this will be a way that people could get off social assistance and give them a little bit of wage employment and looking at the cost of this government to administer a program or offer a program like this. The savings that we as a government will be able, from making social assistance payments and having people go to work, outweighs the $100,000 you're trying to save here. So I'd just like to ask the Minister would you consider avoiding the $100,000 cut to this project?