Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was quite pleased to see in the budget address that there has been a slight increase to the social envelope area. I say that because I know that there are some misconceptions out there. The social envelope does not only include the area of income support or what used to be called social assistance. It includes training and education, health and housing, as well as justice. Mr. Chairman, in fact, the income support area has not increased. It has levelled off. The two or three percent increase that is taking place is not because of income support.

That income support is a very, very small part of the overall budget. I understand that the income support is approximately 15 percent of the overall Education, Culture and Employment budget and four percent of the total budget.

Mr. Chairman, the education levels in the Northwest Territories are at a third world level. Studies in the south have indicated that poor education is related to poverty and related to early deaths and poor health and also to high birthrates. It seems to me that if we want to try to improve the death rates, health and to decrease our forced growth which is largely caused by births to young people, then we have to spend more money or be consistent with our funding at least in the education area.

Also I have heard that we should be putting our efforts into job creation. Mr. Chairman, it does not make too much sense to create a bunch of jobs if we do not have people that are trained well enough to take advantage of those jobs. It seem to me that we have to concentrate on training those people who are unable to take advantage of the jobs and unable to take advantage of the Impact Benefit Agreements that we have negotiated with BHP and that will be negotiated with mines and other areas that come on board in the future.

If we train people, they will be able to get jobs. If we educate people, they will be more able to get jobs. That, in turn, will be able to get them off income support. Mr. Chairman, putting money into education and training is an investment in the future. An investment that the Northwest Territories drastically needs. If it was up to me, I would pour a lot more money into those areas. Mr. Chairman, Education, Culture and Employment is currently working on an NWT labour force development plan. We hope that this will start to address some of the problems that I have spoken about in the areas of training and poor education.

One of the reasons why there has been an increase in the social envelope is because of new initiatives. Some of those new initiatives include early childhood intervention and for families. Mr. Chairman, I have been involved on early intervention projects and I know that there have been studies done which indicate that a child that has gone through early intervention basically if you have kindergarten and maybe pre-school that type of thing you are more likely to finish school. You are more likely to get a job once you get out of school and more likely to go on to post-secondary, which is college, a trade, university, that type of thing. You are also less likely to go on social assistance once you are an adult. You are less likely to be incarcerated, which also places a huge strain on our resources when we have to have hundreds of our people in our institutions. Once you do get a job, if you are laid off you are less likely to remain unemployed for a great length of time.

One American study that I am aware of indicates that every dollar spent on early intervention saves you $5 or $6 in the future. Mr. Chairman, I must indicate that these types of initiatives are very good initiatives and we should support them. Some of that money is also going into training people in the communities, so that once community empowerment does happen the people in the communities will be trained in order to do a good job. There are Members who have commented that the social area is going too high, but they have also commented that to do community empowerment we have to train the people in the communities. We have to be consistent in what we are saying. You want people trained, it is going to cost dollars.