Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess we came up with this policy when the Metis Nation no longer existed. At that time we tried to find a consistent approach, and the government of the day decided that they would take the money that was available for funding the Metis Nation and divide it up amongst the 17 Metis locals that were in existence at the time. The money stayed the same for all these years and the last few years we took an approach whereby if some of the money was not disbursed, we would disburse it before the end of the fiscal year to those Metis locals that were in good standing because, of the 17 Metis locals, there was only 10 or 11 that were in good standing. We would go through an exercise where we would give them their allocation and then towards the end
of the year, if there was a surplus we would disburse it.
More recently we’ve made the conscious decision that we would only fund the 11 Metis locals that are in good standing and we took the $250,000 that was there and we split it 11 ways. It works out to somewhere in the neighbourhood of between $13,000 to $20,000 per year to each local.