Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I said a couple of days ago in the House, we have about $138 or $139 million in our budget this year to provide to education councils and district education authorities to provide school services in the Northwest Territories. This amount represents the equivalent of a $4.2 million decrease in total funding for schools in the '97-98 school year based on what forced growth would normally require or increased resource demands. Have I looked specifically at the impact of other cuts in the Beaufort Delta? The answer is no. What the department has done is it has tried to make sure that the formula for providing funding to divisional education councils is consistent and fair across the north. We cannot very well say to the Baffin board that we are going to make them take a bigger cut than the Beaufort Delta board because they have not had as many cuts from MACA, or vice versa. The issue is providing education for our children in the north and we have to look at it in as fair and balanced a way as we can from that basis. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. With regards to the fairness of these cuts, I think we just recognized a program for $60 million with regards to human strategy yet we cut $4 million out of education. I think that sooner or later these cuts have to come to an end and hopefully we can get back to a normal process of educating our students and children in the communities. The question I would like to ask is when do we see these cuts coming to a halt and getting back to the normal education of our students and having enough teachers in the classrooms to carry out that activity?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in the business plans that are being prepared for this House to consider in the next budget, we have been given no reason to believe that we will see an increase in the amount of money coming into the department, therefore we are planning on pretty much the same funding going to schools in the budget which follows the current year budget.

What that means, Mr. Speaker, is a continued effective cut or a continued increase in the pupil/teacher ratio because as the school populations grow, if we only have the same number of dollars to provide to the divisional education councils to provide education, that means their classroom resources will have to be stretched further and further. So, in answer to the Member's question, I do not see an end coming to the cuts, the effective cuts. I think what we are talking about is trying to find ways to manage to deliver the programs effectively with the same amount of money that we have right now. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question to the Minister is, he talked about the pupil/teacher ratio with regard to its benefit to the larger centres. What about education to all the other smaller communities, Tsiigehtchic and Colville Lake? Basically, they also have the right to education in those

communities and I think we should not cut the communities that are asking for education, yet the larger communities seem to have an incentive to get more money or initiatives used in that sort of policy of evaluating the education in those communities. I think that is the problem we are seeing, that the larger cuts are coming from those communities that do not have a large population base, but yet they still have a right to education. So I ask the Minister if he can find a more flexible way of ensuring that it is equitable and it is not beneficial to one population basically penalizing the smaller populations in order to carry that out.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to make sure the Member understands that an increase in the pupil/teacher ratio does not benefit a larger community over a smaller community. It makes a teacher's job more difficult, no matter what community they are working in. This is not a situation where we are robbing from the smaller communities to provide better services in the larger communities. It just means that every teacher across the Northwest Territories will have more students in their class. I think that the member can be assured that the department works with representatives from all the divisional education councils when setting out the formulas to ensure that as best as is possible, the formulas are applied in an equitable manner across the Northwest Territories. What happens though is that those areas where the population is growing more quickly than in others, because they see a tremendous growth in the number of students, are the areas where there is usually some increase in funding and perhaps then less of a decrease in the number of teachers although that does not mean that each teacher has fewer students in their class. They will all have a larger number of students in their class. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In regards to my final supplementary, I would like to ask the Minister for the information where these layoffs are taking place and exactly the sizes of those classes and the population they represent, so I can get an idea of exactly how fair this distribution really is.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can endeavour to find out from the divisional education councils where they are reducing staff and pass that information on to the Member. I should caution the House though, as I said a couple of days ago, the funding we provide to divisional education councils is like block funding. They may choose to increase or decrease the pupil/teacher ratio over what we provide in the basic funding. They would have to then trade that funding from some other area within the schools. So, every change in the number of teachers in every divisional education council is not necessarily tied to how we provide the funding to them. You cannot just look at the change in the numbers of teachers and put it down to one factor in this whole equation. It is a much more complex arrangement than that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.