Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I think if the forest management people were here today, they would say that they're doing this on a very small budget for the size of our territory and that we actually have to move our folks around when there's fires in different regions because we don't have -- we're not wasting; we don't have them in every single regional centre. I think it's important to recognize that a lot of these contracts are for the 802s and the Electras as well as for flights. And in the past couple years, we've had to increase those because there's been fewer flights so we have fewer eyes in the sky so we've needed to actually go out and look to see and do reconnaissance to see if there's fires burning more so than we have in the past, right.
The compensation and benefits, we work really closely with Indigenous businesses that provide Indigenous people to fight fires for us. And yeah, I think that we're doing this on the smallest budget that we possibly can.
One of the concerns that came up last year that's really important to understand is if you don't have them on contract and there's fires in the south, they'll be down south working the fires and we won't have them up here to fight our fires.
Now, when we don't have a big fire year, of course we look across the government to see if there's any people who need to use the helicopter time for GNWT work so that we can maximize the contracts that we do have in place. But often that is not -- that's not available because we're using them all the time for fires. Thank you, Mr. Chair.