As I said, when the federal government introduced the new Canada child benefit dollars and plan, we had to go and make the changes, as well. We came up with some changes like the community cost adjustment, which adjusted a lot of the way we funded families, and we also, one of those things was the food allowance rates for adults and for mature children, at 18.
At the bottom line, Mr. Speaker, is, when we made those adjustments, all the families are getting more money. As I mentioned, we wanted to make sure that everything was going right and smoothly. We did a review of 171 families. Of those 171 families in July, before we introduced the new changes, $79,000 was being assessed by our government and looked at as income. After the changes were made in September, we looked at it again; $166,000 was not assessed as income. That went into the pockets of families. We have had no concerns. Now it averages about $500 per family.
Income assistance, although we did make the changes to assist low income families, families with children, and we've seen increases right across the board, we continue to give high dollars in income assistance and we continue to see that rise. We're projected, for 2015-2016, to give over $20 million in income assistance to those that need it, throughout the territories.