Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, this one, I'll be frank, is not my favorite one to have to explain. It does go directly to the public accounts and to the public accounting standards, and there's been a now change within the public accounting standards that requires that asset retirement obligations be booked in a way that they weren't before.
So there does need to be as a result of that what is a one-time adjustment to the capital estimates. That's the $70 million that you're seeing. And what that does is it's providing a way of reporting on the - to the public in the books what is anticipated to be a future liability. So it's not an anticipated spend that we didn't already have.
When we have an asset -- so, for example, if there's asbestos over at the museum, when the life of the building -- whatever building it might be -- comes to its end, we already know there would be a cost associated with decommissioning a building or cleaning up a building or removing that asset from once its useful life has come to a conclusion. But previously, that wasn't necessarily reflected. Now the requirement is that we in fact have to reflect that.
So the cost that you're seeing here is the estimate of all of the GNWT assets and what the value is. So that's been added here.
There is an ongoing forward adjustment, $8.5 million to the main estimates to reflect as part of this as well. But, again, it's a measure of what is expected to be paid on an ending asset. It's not new money, and the cost won't be incurred until the assets are actually at the end of life. Thank you, Madam Chair.