Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  On the second, I think you should probably ask the minister. It's a matter of policy. The government thinks it's important to pursue this. The bill was part of the 39th Parliament and would have been considered if we hadn't had the interruption of the election. It's now back and being retabled for this Parliament.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think the RFP is out. That's why we're doing the engineering. So we would see...here are the systems and there are the standards and what's the gap to be filled? We'd be able to give you that number when the results of the engineering study come in.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We can provide our best sense of it, but you have to go out to the communities, and it's a bit subjective as to what's a need and what constitutes overcrowding and so on. But we can certainly try to provide some information to the committee on that. CMHC does a lot of work in terms of data gathering in a sense.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's a different reallocation issue, which I think was in the comment on this side of the table. Since we're not going to leave kids stranded, and we're going to pay our bills to provinces for tuition, and we're going to meet the needs of child and family services, we may have to dial back each year on what we can put—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's the $100 million number, which I think Monsieur Lemay was getting at. We pulled back at the beginning of the year, knowing we'd have to pay the bills in child and family services and education. And to be very candid with the committee and with Parliament, we won't be doing as much infrastructure as a result, and that's because it's all inside this one box that's only growing at 2% a year.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I don't know if I was clear there, but obviously we will pay our bills and we will meet our needs. The children come first.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you. I'll try to be very quick and to do justice to your questions. We don't have any new implementation resources for Bill C-47 or Bill C-21. You'll be able to question us further on that when the bills come forward. On child and family services, I'd be happy to provide the plan and the response.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Not for setting up the infrastructure of organizations and—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The test is health and safety, just as it would be in any other community.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I believe it's new, but we'll correct that—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It would be a lot, because a lot are on wells and septic systems. Part of the strategy we want to use is that if they deliver clean, safe water, they may be the appropriate thing. We may not want to put pipes out to the back part of a community. The test is whether safe water is available, not whether houses—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's what we're working on, with more rigorous inspection of wells and safe small systems—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We'd be happy to provide a written response, Mr. Chairman. One of the reasons we're doing an engineering assessment is to say what the right sizing response is for a particular community. Some are more distributed; some are more clustered. If we can do work with wells and small systems, that might be better than a big plant.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  My colleagues will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the cap also applies to Health Canada for its health care programs on reserves.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The budget guidelines are set by the Finance Department and implemented by Treasury Board and our department.