Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is correct. Since capital funding started being provided to communities in 2007, the number has remained at $28 million. Every year, we seek an increase to operations and maintenance and water and sewer funding, but the capital funding has remained constant.
Even though a number of years ago the overall GNWT capital plan went from $150 million down to $75 million, the community government funding was protected at the $28 million when that decrease happened. Where we focused our effort in the interim was on leveraging federal funding, and we've been quite successful in receiving additional federal funding using that $28 million to leverage federal funding for community governments. Members are aware of Small Communities Fund, Building Canada Fund, other programs that we've been able to bring infrastructure funding to communities.
That said, in 2014, we did an infrastructure deficit analysis and have identified an infrastructure funding gap, and we are currently recalculating our numbers and will be bringing forward a plan in 2017 with regard to how to address the remaining infrastructure gap.
