Thank you, Mr. Chair. What the community needs is not our decision to make and that was the beauty of the New Deal, is it gave the community responsibility to make the
decisions based in their priorities. So if an enclosed rink was one of their priorities then they would find ways to make it work. With the money that we give them through CPI and that, they can access bank financing and we’ve had communities do that where they’ve accessed bank financing, knowing they’re getting their CPI funding every year to help pay down the loan.
Again, the beauty of the New Deal is that the decision-making is within the community. So if we were still making the decision and they wanted to do a small little rink in a small little community like Tsiigehtchic, it would get into the overall corporate picture and it may be years and years before that ever came to see the light of day. But with the program we have now
…and I think we see as we
travel throughout the Northwest Territories some of the projects. In one community, a youth centre might be a priority, so they use their CPI money that we give them to build a youth centre, and another one might be a small community hall.
The decision is pretty well up to the community and I don’t think doing it in a needs base survey is penalizing the community. What we found was that there were some communities that had a lot of infrastructure money banked that they weren’t using because
there
really
wasn’t
much more
infrastructure or they might have been facing challenges with O and M. So we’ve tried to make it more of a needs base. It’s not needs based saying, well, we think you need this as opposed to this. It’s, again, a decision they have to make and we continue to work with them on that. Thank you.