Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In your opening remarks, you were asking about other things we've done. Did you want...?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The subsidy rates were posted on December 1, as we promised. They are introductory rates. We'll keep evolving them. We're not going to be changing them soon. We'll see what the industry says and consider further analysis as it comes in. We announced the advisory board on November 25, and we have regular conference calls with the remaining members.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  They certainly may. They can contact me as well. Our intention here is to find a fair and equitable distribution of the funds that are available. So if we have it wrong.... The industry people are coming to me now, and if there are three or four or two stores in one location, and one is happy and one is not, it usually means that one has a better rate than the other, negotiated with the supplier, perhaps.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  On the situation with Old Crow right now when you travel, some people will show up at the airline counter and have things shipped up through Air North to the community. The airline is the shipper as well as the transporter. That leads to us subsidizing the transporter under the old program—because it was a transportation subsidy—which is making its own demand, frankly, and you have no separation of duties within that type of structure.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It was $27 million.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Could you give me one moment, please?

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's basically right. NNC shifts from a transportation subsidy to a retail subsidy. So our agreements to get the weaknesses around data and control in the food mail program addressed will be with retailers, and they'll pick the most cost-effective way of getting it to the community.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes. For Old Crow, for category one for milk and eggs and whatnot, it's $2 per kilogram.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's not the same. It's a top-down sort of approach, but it's comparable to the existing rate that was there before we had done our analysis to base it on--the rates that were in play all across the north before.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We didn't have the particular independent's own rates. We have them from North West. It's in the higher category. But we don't have every individual store's rates. We have several rates for every community. In order to calculate the $7 million that Patrick was just mentioning and compare it to Canada Post rates, we have multiple rates throughout the environment, and we picked it from there.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We started with a base of 112 retailers.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's correct.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Similar to my last answer, as we said, we took communities using the food mail programs and looked at their volumes with Canada Post, and those that had 15,000 kilograms or more shipped annually are in the program. For those that had less, we will pay companies a nominal 5¢ a kilogram to give us data on the trends into the future so we can relook at eligibility down the road.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  They're both considered non-perishables, so in communities that have sealifts, those two products were delisted on October 3. The winter roads communities still have time to stock up until April 1. In the future they will not be subsidized products because they are non-perishable items that are much cheaper to ship by other means.