Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also came from the private sector before I arrived here. This is the longest I've spent working in the government, other than a stint when I was about 20 years old as an intern. I do also take seriously the situation that is being faced by the private sector right now. That said, Mr. Chair, let me go through a number of the other items that I heard.
Increasing government employment. Again, Mr. Chair, it is very difficult to fight a pandemic when you are redeploying staff who have other jobs to do. The money that we received from the federal government was not money that we could take and drop down wherever we chose to drop it down. The federal government was extremely specific about the types of things they wanted us to do with the funding that they were providing, and not only to us; to every province and territory across Canada. They had very specific intentions. For example, PPE for health workers and non-health workers; support for vulnerable populations; testing; contact tracing; and data management. These were the ways in which the bundles of funding that we received from the federal government were to be allotted.
We had some increased flexibility with respect to the way we spent the airline funding. Although, again, that was negotiated on the part of the northern territories, and specifically our territory, so that we could support every single airline in the Northwest Territories and not only the commercial carriers for passenger flight services, as was given to some of the other provinces, because we wanted to support every single airline in the sector. We've been trying to negotiate that kind of flexibility, and the federal government, to their credit, Mr. Chair, have been doing a lot in terms of trying to ensure that funds are flexible. The wage top-up is another example, for instance, where, even though the way things work here, that wages are higher and, therefore, some of the wage top-up wasn't necessarily working the way it was envisioned in Ottawa, we were given the flexibility to adapt it to our needs.
However, that's not the case across the board. The money that is coming in from the federal government, significant amounts of money, millions of dollars of funding that has come in from the federal government, a lot of it has come in for specific purposes, and the money that is being put towards the work in the COVID secretariat is no different. It's not that we can go in and just spend it on more nursing positions. It's not that simple; I wish it were.
As for the job losses, Mr. Chair, we have experienced job losses. So has everywhere else in Canada or the world experienced job losses. We are quite fortunate here in the Northwest Territories to be comparatively insulated such that, by the end of this particular calendar year, we are expecting to be back up at around 90 percent of our pre-COVID job numbers. The exception to that is in the tourism and hospitality industry. I said that earlier today, Mr. Chair. That industry is going to be continuing to be struggling and suffering, and that is not new or different here than it is anywhere else. That is the message I've heard from other Ministers across Canada, and all of those Ministers across Canada are asking for funding specific from the federal government and are looking for ways that we can use best practices one to the next.
That doesn't change the fact that we have to continue to respond to COVID-19. It doesn't change the fact that we have to continue to keep the people in the Northwest Territories safe. Nobody is going to have jobs in the way that they want to have jobs if we have to shut everything back down because there is a community spread that develops. So far, we have not had community spread in the Northwest Territories, Mr. Chair, and it is our intention to do everything we can to continue that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.