Mr. Minister, you can answer Ms. Bisaro’s question.

Mr. Chair, this has been a stable source of funding for a few years. We have not really had any indication from any of the sport and rec partners that they are underfunded. I am sure if they felt they were underfunded and came forward with requests, then we would have to have a look at it, but at this point they seem to be... I shouldn’t be speaking for them, but until you hear from them, you assume they are quite satisfied with the funds that they’re getting. Thank you.

Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That leads me right into a question with regard to Sport North who has indicated over the years that they’re not being adequately funded to manage the trials and transfer, whatever, the whole dealing with athletes in and around Arctic Winter Games; regional trials, territorial trials and then taking the kids to the games. So I would like to ask the Minister has he not ever heard that Sport North has difficulties in funding those trials? Thank you.

With this we multisport game funding of $650,000 that will flow to Sport North trough the Sport and Recreation Council. We are confident this will address a lot of their concerns about the lack of funding. Thank you.

I kind of figured this question would be coming up. It’s a good question because it does seem like there is youth money all over the place here. But we have different criteria for each of these different pots of money and I suppose if we put it all into one pot and whoever comes forward with their applications for or puts together the best applications and they might be getting more than their share. As I said before, as I was doing my comments to the opening remarks, we are confident with the new website that’s being launched, that would answer a lot of these questions. It would be a good map to access some of the different pots of funding within this particular department and across government. We try to keep them separate because these are pots of money that are specifically for youth purpose and the criteria might be a bit different. Thank you.

Thanks for the explanation. I guess we have to agree to disagree. I’m not so sure that telling people to go to a website to find out what funding is available is the best way to make sure that the money gets where we want it to go.

I would like to ask the Minister why we have funding for youth corps in two different places in this particular budget. It’s on page 6-34 for $825,000, and it’s again on page 6-39 for $500,000. The descriptions are exactly the same. What’s the difference between these two? Thank you.

One of the youth corps pots is for territorial-wide initiatives. The other youth corps funding goes to the regions for regional activities. Thank you.

Next on the list is Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. A quick question. On the volunteer contribution, I’m wondering if those are fully taken up every year.

Minister of MACA.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the uptake on this particular contribution has been quite slow, but we’re working at trying to get it out there and get it utilized to all the money that’s available. Thank you.

I’m just wondering what the process is. Obviously, this is something that MLAs should be able to help out with and I would think we’d be willing conduits to help get the application information out there to our constituents and organizations, community organizations. I’m just wondering what is the process that organizations should know about.

Mr. Chair, they can apply to the regional offices or to headquarters. What I can do, and I can commit to the Members, is that I’ll put a bit of package together and I’ll give it to all Members, because, as Mr. Bromley said, you can be conduits to the folks out there that may not know that this initiative exists. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister. I appreciate that commitment. I wonder if the Minister has had a chance to look into it to see if it’s something onerous about the application. Maybe, rather than a question, I’ll just ask him to commit to making sure it’s not an overly difficult process that’s stymieing people. I’ll leave it at that. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I don’t think it’s a question of it being an onerous process. I think a good reason that the uptake is not as high as it should be is because probably the information is not out there that this is available. That’s why I’ll commit to the Members that I’ll get them some information and they can pass that on to their volunteer groups. Thank you.

Under contributions, $3.265 million.

Total grants and contributions, $3.365 million.

Information item, sport, recreation and youth, active positions.