Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would also like to acknowledge the presence of the many people in the gallery today. It is nice to see this kind of turnout for such an important issue. I am probably going to be going over some areas that may have already been covered, Mr. Chairman, in previous comments. But I think it is worthy to make note of that in the record that we produce. Of concern, of course, and what we are really referencing all our material to is the ministerial forum report that was done. It made many recommendations for improvement of the education system, but the reality has become that we do not have the money to put into a number of areas that do need to be addressed. That is a concern, of course, to us as legislators, the Cabinet no doubt, but also everybody in the territory who is involved in the education field or who have children that people want educated. It is an extremely difficult problem, but I would like to touch on four areas of the report and make some general comments in those areas. They pertain to teacher shortage, the pupil/teacher ratio, the resources we have and new programs that the government introduces. Each to me is very relevant and does require dollars in order to have some resolution to the problem.
Let me first deal with the teacher shortage. I do not think that it is any surprise to anybody that we have a teacher shortage because of the conditions that we are facing here in the Northwest Territories but also elsewhere. We are in a situation where teacher competition is very prevalent in the provinces. As a matter of fact, the Ontario Teachers Federation, I believe, was predicting large teacher shortages. They employ quite a number of teachers. Also, the Canadian Teachers Federation was saying one of the big factors facing the education system today was the potential shortage. I understand that recruitment offices have been set up in Ontario and various provinces to recruit teachers, and this is from other countries. The United States, as I understand, is looking to recruit teachers and of course there are some attractions there, so the whole question comes back for us is what can we do here in the Northwest Territories to retain our teachers? I pose it as a rhetorical question, not looking for an answer at this particular moment.
For example, how successful are we at our Teacher Education Program and where are we going with the Teacher Education Program? Is that successful and are we retaining those teachers that we are training or are they also going to the south? In other words, are we paying for a system and not succeeding at retaining those teachers? The teacher shortage area, while I recognize that it is not totally of our making, there are some areas that we have created some problems, I feel for our teachers and it is partially the working conditions that they have been placed under. It is the living conditions in the communities that some of them face. These are all areas that we do have control over and we can do something about. When Mr. Miltenberger said that only 32 of the 44 recommendations are non-monetary or let me reverse that, 32 of the 44 are non-monetary, there may be some truth to that but the 12 that were left as monetary are sort of the key areas. They are the ones that are really affecting our education system out there. So the dollar aspect comes into play and the big question, of course, is what is the government doing about finding those dollars?
I know we talked about this last week and there were some discussion on what recommendations do we have. Well I can keep throwing out recommendations, but I am not sitting in that chair, and I am not sitting over there, I am not the one who is governing. I am here as a MLA and I can throw out the suggestion. We can sit here all day as we did last week and give you people suggestions. But you have to go to work on this. You have to come up with the answers. We have thrown out the suggestions.
Let me deal for a second with the pupil/teacher ratio issue. Mrs. Groenewegen referenced that a little earlier and the pupil/teacher ratio, while the statistics were given to us of 18/1, believe it was, that was only a funding formula to the best of my knowledge. That does not indicate exactly how many students are in a class. It is only a funding formula to the boards. The boards will put forward and say, okay we have this number of students and this number of employees and therefore the government says right, you get this many dollars. In many classes the 18/1 one, well that is thrown out as an average usage, 15/1, 16/1, 17.5/1, 18/1, that is not really true. What is really true is that may be far exceeded beyond those figures in many cases. I know in British Columbia they have already passed legislation, I believe, to limit class sizes. In Alberta a resolution has been adopted to limit class sizes to 22 students and that is for certain grades.
Let me carry on with another area, and that is resources in the classroom and other programs. We seem to take the approach, and I am going to delve into the other area that I was going to speak on, new programs that we come up with, ideas to introduce new programs, but what we do not do is provide the funding for those programs adequately. We seem to say, okay we have this kind of money, so divy it up across the territory and people will have to make do with that. The Grade Extension Program is one example of that, where we said, yes, there was a political push back in 1991, I have some of the debates here on that, and yes, we have grade extensions, but there was never adequate money put into this. Plus there was never an analysis done of the effect of that. I mean, what is the effect of grade extensions to all of the communities? We do need to ask that at some point. How many teachers does it take to operate in all of those communities? How many graduates do we have from those communities? I am not against those communities having grade extensions if they so wish. What I am saying is, how effective are they and if they are not effective, why? Are we not providing the funding for it?
When we talk about resources and I said that last week, that if you are going to introduce a new program, be like a business person, you do not say, well, we are going to expand our business into this area and then not put the dollars into it. I think that is bad management and I think we do that sometimes as this government. We have to take a look at all of our programs. One of the things we need to do is to say, put a halt on new programs and analyze the programs that we have. Make sure that there is top efficiency in all areas. I will limit my comments for the moment to that, Mr. Chairman, to let others have some general comments and then I likely will have some questions. Thank you.