Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think it is important that we talk about this kind of thing in the House, and I think, having been a Member of the Standing Committee on Finance, my understanding of this motion is not that it intends to focus on only those people who are at the top end of the intelligence scale.

Concern among Members was that, too often, when questions were asked of the department, the response was, "We are getting this many people to do this, we have got this many people in school now and this is the proportion of people who are graduating". What we were saying is that all along, we didn't see or didn't hear, from people in the department, a focus on doing their job better than anyone else. We want the people who are educating children in the north to do the job better than anyone else. We want them to be excellent as educators. We want the focus of the department to be on excellence. We want the department itself to say, we can do this better than anyone else. That was the intent, more than anything else, of this motion. Rather than saying, we are going to do things because it is going to keep more people in school, we want people to be proud of the system of education we have here and to work hard at ensuring that the best possible education is being delivered to the people who are enrolled in the system.

There was no intent, from anybody on the Standing Committee on Finance, to suggest that we should target gifted children and do anything special. That was not at all the intent of this motion. The intent is to say, let's make sure that everybody who is working at providing education to children are doing their absolute best to make sure that our system is excellent. Let's make sure that we are trying to tell the kids who are involved in the system that excellence is what we are after. Let's make sure that we are supporting their best efforts to excel, no matter what their areas of excellence are. Let's get people confident, assured and working their best in the educational field. This was not intended at all to say that we should single out one specific group and provide special resources to them.

This was an overall recommendation that everybody should concentrate on doing the best possible job. The goal shouldn't be just to keep people in school. It should be to make sure that they are achieving something by staying in school, that we are getting graduates.