Thank you, Mr. Chair. The special events program is intended to fund annual general assemblies and annual celebrations of the National Aboriginal Day. The reduction allows us to retain the funding that goes to support the National Aboriginal Day celebrations, which provides $1000 to each community to hold events on that day, plus provide funding to Aboriginal governments that are celebrating significant milestones of either an anniversary or of signing an agreement, or another similar event of a significant celebration event.
The decision to cut was more on the annual general assembly side, where we weren't getting a significant amount of applications every year. It ranged from two to four. So that presented an opportunity. The Member is correct that the actual year prior is much higher than the actual -- that's a bit of a blip for that particular year in question, where we had provided some funding on one-time events that were unique in nature. So we did have things of the nature where we funded the Canadian for New Partnerships, to get them off the ground. It's a national organization, one time only for $30,000. We provided funding for the Sahtu Secretariat so that they could hold discussions on some workshops internally about engaging with the GNWT. So those were two unique events that sort of boosted those costs up for that one year only. Thank you, Mr. Chair.