Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Territorial Formula Financing Grant increased by approximately $88 million in ’14-15, and of that, $67 million was due to the adjustment to our base with devolution and $39 million was due to the escalation of the grant of about 2.9 percent.

The issue, really, is the population growth. Our growth, relative to the growth in Canada, is a big factor in escalating our grant and right now our population is stagnant and we’re not growing at a rate equal to the rate of the rest of the country. As a result, it has an adverse impact on our rate of growth. So, we are predicting, based upon what’s happening with our population and some other factors, including provincial local spending, is that our grant, our base will grow roughly between 2 and 2.5 percent a year. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So, as Minister Miltenberger has stated, they recalculated how they are going to calculate the CHT transfers for provinces and territories and it went per capita transfer, tax transfer, which for ourselves and Alberta was beneficial. So we have what appears to be a one-time escalation of about $10 million on the CHT and we don’t expect that that’s going to continue, starting next year. We know that CHT will grow after this year by roughly about 6 percent a year until, I believe, about ’16-17 or ’17-18. I can’t remember which year that is, and then it will

increase. As per the announcement last year by the federal government, it will increase by a nominal GDP, or a floor of 3 percent.

If we look at for the year ’13-14, which, really, the taxation revenue that we’re receiving this year is based on the 2012 tax year, we’re looking at a personal income tax drop of about $18 million over what we originally estimated last year, and in ’14-15, based upon that, we’re looking at a personal income tax drop of about a further $38 million. Then it should start to level off after that and we will start to see some stabilization, hopefully, but that is what we’re looking at this year, remainder of this year and for going into ’14-15.

For PIT, personal income tax, we get an estimate from the federal government that’s based on what they’ve seen in previous years based upon what they see happening with personal taxation across the country. Before that we were looking at an estimate much higher and then in December we got some federal estimates back that national taxable incomes were lowered in December based on the 2012 actual returns that were received to date. In addition to that – and we went back to 2005 to check on this, because it was the first time since we’ve been keeping detailed records that consistent – with that is the number of tax filers in the Northwest Territories has declined from 2011, causing the NWT share of total estimate to decrease, so our 2012 actual returns lower the

2012 estimate. That’s the reason for the decline in the estimate, but the federal government collects personal and corporate income taxes on our behalf, much like they do for almost every other jurisdiction, with the exception of Quebec, and for corporate income tax for Alberta they collect the tax and they provide the estimates on that taxation revenue back to the jurisdictions

Thank you. As the Minister said, for corporate income tax we’re going to use a five-year rolling average. That’s probably a little bit more realistic and a little bit more conservative and gives us some downside mitigation. For personal income tax, because there has been such a big adjustment, we’re going to wait another year and see what happens with the number of filers, and we’ll get a better understanding in May, when we actually get the more detailed data from Canada on what happened with the 2012 tax year, to try and figure out what’s actually happening.

Certainly on the corporate side, we’ve always been subject to a lot of volatility from year to year. We’re going to take a more, I think, prudent, conservative approach.

On the personal income taxes, this is the first time we’ve seen this and it could just as easily come back. We don’t know, so we want to take a little bit more wait and see, and see if we can dig into the data and see if we can see what’s happening there. But on the corporate side, we’re changing the approach where we’re just going to go with the five-year average, as the Minister said, instead of relying completely on the federal estimate.