Thank you, Mr. Chair. In this budget, there is funding to support a number of outreach programs that we do through procurement shared services. We deliver workshops for businesses and local governments. Over the past year, we had 60 participants attend these workshops from across the territory.
If I go back, and we are still tabulating information for this fiscal year, for 2017-2018, we delivered 18 workshops to businesses on how to do business with the GNWT, which 200 participants attended. We do those workshops in the regional centres or anywhere there is a request to hold a workshop in the Northwest Territories. These things cover things on how to bid on GNWT tenders, how to use the contract and opportunities website, any changes that are made in procurement policies and guidelines, and how to fill out forms and follow some of the preference programs. We also deliver programs and training to our own employees. We have held 83 procurement employee training workshops in 2017-2018, where over 690 employees participated.
A number of these things, we also reached out to the construction community and the contractor community, and held workshops with the construction associations, the engineer associations, the consulting engineers, and Arctic Association to review the approved capital plan once it has been passed, so that vendors and contractors have an idea of what the contracting opportunities are coming up. Those things are all base funded in this budget under procurement shared services. Thank you, Mr. Chair.