Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's good of the honourable Member to take care of my constituency. Mr. Chairman, I want to say this, and it's a point I made here earlier. Extension of school programming doesn't necessarily mean expansion to schools. The problem with the suggestion of extension is that somehow there is a misconception that there's an automatic addition to schools. That's not necessarily the case.
What needs to be done -- it was a point I made earlier -- is that there needs to be a program plan which addresses the program needs, both in terms of the financial resources, the human resources, student accommodation and program accommodation. Once that is done we can indicate whether there is a requirement on our part to consider additional space and accommodation, more additions to the school, to meet the increasing grades in those schools. Until those are done it becomes very difficult to suggest that there's a need for extension.
Another issue is that there may be space in the schools already that are not being used but, for instance, are being used in adult programming which can be utilized for high school programming and needs to be renovated as such. The question then is, how do we accommodate the adult Arctic College programming? We have to work with the community to address those particular needs. That's the way in which we are dealing with it right now. There are other renovations.
The unfortunate problem we have across the north, while the honourable Member may not recognize this fact, is that Aklavik and McPherson, in terms of major renovations, had to be moved back so we could accommodate some of the more serious problems of population growth in other communities such as Igloolik, Arviat or Coral Harbour. Those were the issues that we were concerned about.
I may suffer politically, but I think from a management perspective it's the right decision to make. If we're always looking for money just to build in our communities, we are certainly not going to address the immediate needs of the student growth in some of the more serious problem areas. I made mention of this issue because it is something that has to be considered when we all plan for capital expenditures in education.
As it is -- I mentioned this before -- we are very short of funding in this area despite the fact that we've indicated a priority here. It seems that there has been no major increase in education, nor is there any direction given for that to occur.