Thank you, Madam Chair. There are three ways that a student loan can get dealt with. One is if the student is eligible for remission when they return to the Northwest Territories and gain employment, they can have elements of their loan or the full loan over time remitted in that it's an incentive for our students to both complete their education and come back to work in the Territories. That's one way they can get the loan addressed.
The other way is if they complete their studies or even if they interrupt their studies and they don't return or are somehow ineligible for remission, then they can repay the loan and we would enter into a repayment plan with them. If for any reason the loan does not get remitted or repaid, then we would put it into collection activity and we would try to work out a payment plan with the student and try to resolve the debt.
In situations where we have tried to find the student, some of them might leave the Territories and not leave forwarding addresses and we aren't able to track them down, if after six years we have not been able to perform any substantive collection on the account, then the account becomes statute barred and we cannot legally further pursue the account, and many of these accounts in here are of that nature. So perhaps the answer to the member's question is that six years is rather a key date because that's the legislation that means that the account is statute barred if in that six years we have not been able to or have not taken any collection action.