Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have general comments and partly a question to the Minister. When a community or a regional divisional board requests of the government a capital project for the capital plan, who decides the final priorization of the capital projects? I say this, Mr. Chairman, because there are times when the community education boards or the divisional boards wanted to have a capital plan to have first priority and the Minister may not have agreed with it. I am told by the people I represent that it is not always the case when a community wants a community centre to be built the first year and when the Minister's priority does not agree with the community, then that plan is either deferred or not in the capital plan. In some cases, the Minister may change the capital plan. My question is, how serious is the input from the regional divisional boards or community boards taken by the Minister? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the community educational council authority take the board very seriously. It's been my view that we should try to transfer as much of the responsibility for planning and managing of resources to those agencies. The only issue that would be of concern to me would be whether we could accommodate a particular project within the financial resources that have been allocated. Generally speaking, that is the way I am approaching that particular matter.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, once we get into details at the appropriate time, I will be asking further questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Minister has indicated several times that they are now in the process of changing the criteria on the capital plan on the basis of new enrolment methods of students. The Minister knows that in two years, I have been bringing up the question of overcrowding in Chesterfield Inlet. I guess my blunt question is, Mr. Chairman, does the capital plan that is now in place have the new criteria in mind?

Mr. Chairman, the development of the plan was based on the criteria that was previously used, except to say the projects themselves. We will consider the

new criteria and standards once they have been developed and approved by myself and my Cabinet colleagues. We had planned to have them done by December of 1993, but we've only been able to get the framework together and we'll probably not have them complete, in detail, until early January of next year.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. January of next year, meaning a couple of months from now, I take it. They will then be implemented and used for capital plans thereafter?

Mr. Chairman, yes. We've been directed, by the Standing Committee on Finance, to develop some new criteria and standards and we are responding. We knew that there was a need for us to respond previously and that's what we are doing now.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Then I take it that the Department of Education will be developing a new method of capital planning. In other words, I suspect that Chesterfield is an acute situation, but it's not an exception. Under the old criteria, a lot of schools, including Pond Inlet, are in overcrowded situations. What I'm trying to get at here is that this particular capital plan on education has no significant increase with all the significant enrolment. Some students who have dropped out before are coming back to school and the birthrate is twice as much as the national average. It has surprised the department that kids are also enroling in kindergarten and the students are coming back after the grade extension program has been introduced. Will there be a more relevant budget made so that we should not relegate ourselves to the 1994-95 capital estimate but completely drop this idea and put in a new fresh approach to capital planning on education.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The whole issue of the standards and criteria that have been used previously is clearly out of date. It's obvious from our calculations, that we are not planning to respond to the growing populations of school age children and also adult training programs that we are implementing in our communities.

As a result of that, we have taken the initiative to come forward to respond, first of all, to the kinds of comments that have been made by the Standing Committee on Finance and concerns expressed in this House, to revise the standards and criteria. We are doing that now. I had hoped that we could have them concluded by December. However, because we have been preoccupied by a number of other issues, such as the budgetary process, we have been unable to complete the

details of that work. As a result, it is going to take us about an additional month before we have concluded that issue.

In future, the capital planning we do will be based on those new standards and criteria of which high school planning is another aspect. St. Pat's, I believe is the first high school built 25 years ago, so the standards that are being used are a bit old and really not, in many ways, reflective of the kinds of programming that we are going to offer in that school. So, that is the problem and we recognize it.

Mr. Chairman, I suppose that I will be asking more questions when this new criteria, or education strategy, is introduced in the sitting in February and March. I will be asking this during the question period for the purpose of clarification and validity of that new approach. However, Mr. Chairman, I would like to make several general comments on the need to recognize education as a priority. I understand the government is making the social housing shortage a priority. I am not disagreeing with that. However, I think we should not be confused between the crisis of social or public housing shortage and the planning priority of education. I think a lot of answers can be made down the road when you have good educational programs. I think that has also been demonstrated in Greenland where they have 200 years of education. They have become a lot more independent and competitive in the free market. Also, if you look at that market, it's approximately 4,000 Inuit students in universities and colleges. Although we're very far from Greenland, this is the kind of aggressive approach they have been taking.

I think we are doing the same thing in the north, especially with the parents and teachers now, with the new attitude toward education for their children. I think we, as the government, must respond accordingly. We simply cannot simply preach about affirmative action programs, high unemployment of the aboriginal people and the high importation of the outside employees for construction, police, nurses, teachers, et cetera. I commend the Minister for taking on the fresh look, not just on the attitude for education, but also in the capital planning that will be initiated.

Today's reality in the communities is not what the government figures, or what the formula is for finding out that communities require a certain number of classrooms. I hope we will be making a more realistic, rather than a bureaucratic or scientific approach, to figuring out what our needs are for school programs in the communities. These are the general comments I wanted to make at this time, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In the last ten years, as a Member, one of the things that I have campaigned for -- and it is based on the campaign that people elect you -- was the establishment of a student residence or a hostel in Fort Providence. One of the things that I kept hearing from the Executive is that you have to get support from the communities. The support you get is interpreted the way the

government wants to interpret it. Although the support was based on getting in as a Member, the Executive Council doesn't think that is a factor in determining where capital projects should go. So, one of the avenues I have taken is to request the support of local education authorities in that area. I have gotten very little response. They didn't give me any support at all. Naturally, I looked at the reasons. More aboriginal issues is a reason why they refuse to support my request.

My whole purpose of getting a hostel is so we can somehow support the agricultural aspirations of the community, Mr. Chairman. During the last Assembly, I made a motion in the House which was supported by this Assembly. That didn't help. The government didn't act on it. One of the reasons for that is that now, the process is to have the divisional boards address the capital allocations of the regions. Again, I have a situation in which some programs deal with Fort Smith and some other programs deal with Fort Simpson. But, for the purposes of my opening remarks, I will refer to the Deh Cho divisional board as the board I deal with, with regard to the aspirations of my community.

Mr. Chairman, on April 18, I made a presentation to the Deh Cho divisional board. This was a 30-page presentation justifying why Fort Providence should have a hostel. At that time, there were two hostels being built in Fort Simpson and one of them wasn't being used at that time. I requested the Deh Cho divisional board give me that hostel and just barge it to Fort Providence, because it was under used. However, after two hours of meeting with the board on April 18, I was given a letter sometime in July explaining that the board couldn't support me at this time. Every month, I get a 20-page report from the divisional boards -- very vague reports, nothing concrete. It doesn't tell us about motions or discussions or anything like that. So, I've looked at the reports. It says in three or four sentences that Mr. Gargan made a presentation. I have written back to the divisional board of education to request transcripts of the discussion after my presentation. Because I felt that it would make the board very uncomfortable if I stayed there while they discussed my wish, I left after I made my presentation. They didn't provide me with any minutes of the meetings that took place or of the motions, or anything that suggests why they didn't support me. To this day, I have not received anything on why my request was not supported. Of course, I also made a Member's statement on it on many occasions.

I have a file. This is one file that is getting thicker and thicker by the year, without going anywhere, Mr. Chairman. My one problem is, when does a Member stop being a Member, and when do the divisional boards become the supreme authorities in allocation of capital projects? I cannot distinguish this myself.

I do not belong to the Standing Committee on Finance, so I hope the committee will listen to many of the issues I am expressing and hear where I am coming from.

Another way of addressing the issue would be to decide whether or not we should have divisional boards as witnesses, when discussions are made on education and why these things are happening here and there. I haven't been successful in getting anything to explain why they refused my request. I am left in the air with nothing to do but address it here, because it is my last resort to address a situation like this.

Mr. Chairman, the other thing is that -- I don't know when -- in the divisional board's report, I saw my own honourable Member for Nahendeh make his presentation for his case. I see, by the capital allocation, that Jean Marie River is getting some money for a new one-room classroom. Fort Simpson is getting a new elementary school. Trout Lake is getting a new school. Renovations are given for the Thomas Simpson School. I don't know how much consultation Mr. Antoine did with the divisional boards, but during the last two meetings that happened in Fort Simpson, I was the only one who made a presentation for my community.

The other thing that I want to express concern about is that there is talk about the divisional board planning to shut down the school in Kakisa. The people in Kakisa are concerned about that. I don't know how they justify that, but the people in Kakisa are left in limbo. They don't know where they stand with regard to the school in Kakisa yet. We have a new one-room school in Jean Marie River. The population in Trout River is not much different. Once again, where are the priorities of the divisional boards? In my opinion, their priority is this: to ensure that we have regional high schools, that everything goes toward that; and, as much as possible, limit the allocations to the communities that would make it difficult for those regions to establish themselves. That is the only rationale I can come up with.

Even though my school was built in 1960, and even though I know there are school buildings built in 1973 that are being replaced, I haven't made a point of that. Because, I feel that the issue of responsibility has to be addressed here and now. I hope that it also clarifies my position on what I should be doing, in order to achieve what my community needs, and whether or not I am wasting my time travelling to these divisional board meetings, and making my case without any apparent results.

I don't wish the Minister to respond. But, I wish that Members would hear me out, see where I'm coming from and the concerns I have. I would hope that perhaps next year there might be plans for a hostel in Fort Providence. I want this government to take the first initiative to identify future allocation of money for a hostel in Fort Providence. I also want the community of Fort Providence to be the first to make their case to refuse it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.