Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So what we've heard from communities is that there's a huge gap in the kinds of funding that's available for emergency preparation and sort of avoidance and management. So I know that MACA provides some supports at the very earliest stage of, you know, theoretically coming up with sort of frameworks and very sort of broad plans, but then there's really no funding available between that very early stage and then once -- the next time funding is available is if widespread damage has already occurred. You know, you can get money after the fact if disaster has befallen your community, although not always in that case either. But we are not really incentivising people to do the work necessary to prepare community infrastructure, to make sure that there's people in the community that are properly trained to actually implement these theoretical plans that, you know, are discussed at the very early stages.
So to give one example, if there's a community that is living -- that's next to the Mackenzie River and they know that there could be, you know, ice jams and flooding each year, they might have a theoretical plan but if what we need to do is find funding to actually move buildings further away from the river or, you know, even if water were rising and, as a precautionary measure, they needed to move people out and evacuate people just in case disaster befell them, I'm not aware that there's actually any funding available for them to go ahead and do that. So there's every incentive in place just to wait until the disaster already happens and, you know, houses are already damaged and people are already hurt, because that's the only time you're going to get funding. So this seems to me totally backwards in terms of how we're creating incentives for people to actually avoid disaster in the first place.
Can the Minister speak to what steps are being taken to actually assist communities and find funding for them for all of the stages in between, you know, creating this theoretical framework and disaster having already happened? Thank you, Mr. Chair.