Thank you, Madam Chair. When a student receives funding to attend post-secondary studies through the remissible loan, part of the agreement is that they would return to the Northwest Territories and live here in order to pay back that loan. They are not in fact required to make financial payments towards that loan. At current rates, for every year that a student attends post-secondary studies, it takes them approximately two years, in fact 1.7 years to come back to the Northwest Territories and remiss that same amount of money.
The rate that we are currently providing our remission rates compared to the amount that we provide has resulted in the rate of which students are receiving the remission to take longer. As a result, we have more funds that are being disbursed than are being written off or forgiven at the same time.