Thank you. Minister of MACA.

We'll get back to him.

All right. Thank you for the commitment. Member for Yellowknife North.

Thank you. And I know that this is with the communities and, you know, we're trying to get some feedback, but can we get a bit of a timeline on when we expect, or even when the Minister would be comfortable sharing draft new funding formula policies? Just trying to get some sort of timeline where we're at with this. Thank you.

Thank you. Minister of MACA.

We're hoping to have it in the first quarter of the 2023-2024 fiscal year.

Thank you. Member for Yellowknife North.

Thank you. And I know there's -- I do -- well, I don't get why we can't share what we think the current gap is for each community. But I do get why there's some inaccuracies. Like, the Minister spoke earlier about asset management plans. It's actually very hard to, you know, know how much it's going to cost to replace all of your sewer pipes and roads and a lot of communities don't have that data. But I know one of the points of tension is that if you get federal money, if a community goes and gets federal money, it's a little unclear how that affects the funding formula or how it should even. You know, if you managed to pull down $50 million, should you be entitled to less money, or should we be saying no, it's not going to affect the formula as I believe it presently doesn't because you went and got the federal money, and we're happy to -- we want to kind of support that.

Can the Minister just speak to how, if at all, the new policies are going to address this issue of, you know, surprise federal money coming into municipalities' budgets? Thank you.

Thank you. Minister of MACA.

It will have no impact. Thank you.

Thank you. Member for Yellowknife North.

I'm going to try one more time to kind of get some information what the gap is. We added $5 million here. I see that line item for the mandate commitment of $5 million but the formula does have inflationary kind of increases built into it. So can someone just tell me, from the beginning of this Assembly until the end, what the change in the gap is? I imagine -- I think it's roughly nothing. We just managed to barely curb inflation with $5 million but if we have that information, could it be provided. Thank you.

Thank you. Minister of MACA.

Thank you. Member for Yellowknife North.

And then next I guess a bit of an accounting thing. It's nice to see this $5 million, mandate commitment funding of $5 million. It's very clear and you can track it. But I'm also a little concerned. Sometimes I see things like this, and then they just disappear because it's not actually in the community government funding line item. Is the plan next fiscal essentially will it just automatically read that the community government funding line item will be $54 million, or is it essentially up to the next Assembly to go well, we need to create a mandate funding line item again? How exactly is that $5 million going to play out in the next budget? Thank you.

Thank you. Minister of MACA.

For that detail, I'll turn to the deputy minister.

Thank you. Deputy minister Gareau.

Thank you. Are there any further questions under Municipal and Community Affairs, regional operations? Member for Great Slave.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, just over the weekend, or week or whatever day it is, another water line went in my riding and it created a bunch of havoc and thank goodness that, even though they're on strike, the city workers did come out and take care of that. And I want to say thank you for that. Sorry, a lock out, as my colleague corrected me. And so therefore I would like -- yeah, I just want to say thank you to that.

And so when I look at the water and sewer services funding, and note that we're not increasing from last year and have actually decreased from the actuals of 2021-2022, can the Minister or department speak to whether or not there's a plan to increase that or other pots of funding municipalities and communities can be accessing to repair their crumbling infrastructure? Thank you.

Thank you. Minister of MACA.

Thank you. For that detail, I'll turn to the deputy minister. Thank you.