Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for that question. So the supplementary reserve is something in the operations budget that gives $35 million available for those unexpected things that come through as part of the supplementary appropriations process. And as I mentioned earlier, there are roughly four supplementary appropriations processes that go on through the year. So it's fully expected that we will have sups or supplementary appropriations. That's normal. Not everything happens neatly in, you know, say in advance of the February budget cycle. But at the same time, you want to make an effort as a government to plan these things out so that we aren't having to come back. So keeping it at $35 million over the last few years, again barring the COVID event, is meant to reflect, you know, that this isn't meant to just be a slush fund. It should be something that has -- and it does have specific parameters in the financial administration manual about when the departments can come back.
The operating surplus in the main estimates, that is where we budget an amount that allows a surplus not as an overall surplus. There's still the department -- or the Government of the Northwest Territories is still running a debt, but it gives us the ability to pay for the capital plan, so -- and part of what we're hoping to do now is actually use that budget in a way that we can spend 100 percent of our dollars to pay for our capital plan rather than 50 percent, which is what's in the Fiscal Responsibility Policy.
When we went into the summer season and expended all the money that we had to support the wildfires, that came from the operating surplus. That's where that money was kind of coming out of. And we are now looking at, having gone through that, puts us either at zero or at a slight bit of a deficit. Pretty common for governments to run deficit budgets overall. We just typically hadn't done that. That's not normally how we do it. But that is quite common that governments obviously can run deficit budgets. Thank you.