Thank you, Mr. Chair. Youth will find something to do. You know, we can't say don't do drugs, don't get into trouble. They'll find something to do. So what we need to do is give them an alternative to those things. We need to give them activities that they can engage in that are safe and that are healthy. And, you know, I grew up in the Northwest Territories. I know what it's like. In Hay River, there was a time there was no youth centre; you'd just walk around town. I mean, that's not necessarily the safest thing to do, especially these days with what we're seeing happening in the communities. So one of the changes that was made in the last government, I brought forward changes to our capital standards for schools. It used to be that if you had less than a certain number of students, you got no gym if you got a new school. Or if you had a certain small number of students, you might get a gym, but it would be small. You wouldn't be able to really practice even half-court basketball in it. And so changes were made so that every new school in every community that is built will get a gym. The size of the gyms has also increased for the smaller communities. Because I've been to a number of the communities with the small gyms, and those just aren't adequate. They're not going to prepare students to -- you know, to go on to the Arctic Winter Games and things like that. So that's one major thing that we've already done.
There's been efforts to work with the DEAs in communities to ensure access to those gyms as well. Because it's the DEAs who do control the access, and so we want to work with them to ensure that those gyms can stay open after hours, on weekends if necessary.
A number of years ago, we also made change -- the 18th Assembly made changes to how funding is distributed to sports organizations. It's been a number of years now. I think it might be time to relook at that and ensure that money is being used in the way we want it to be used, and it is supporting the types of organizations we want it to support. There could perhaps be some more local and regional funding available. And this goes to our support for NGOs as well. We need to ensure that funding we do have, whether it's arts or sports, is accessible to NGOs and that it is stable as well, so we have multiyear funding. So there's a number of changes that we can and should make. Thank you.