Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wish to talk today about student financial assistance, as this is something that is near and dear to my heart. I have raised this issue in this House before.

As many of my colleagues know, I attended high school in Yellowknife and went on to university in the south. I have to say that the student financial assistance, from an administrative point of view, has certainly improved. I remember the first time I applied for student financial assistance, I had great difficulty. It was very confusing. I believe things have improved.

But as I mentioned previously in this House, unfortunately, tuitions at southern institutions have doubled, and sometimes tripled, over the last 10 years. The rates for student financial assistance in the Northwest Territories are the same as they were when I was going to school. This is no longer acceptable. We do not have a positive situation when we are expecting kids to make do with less.

We can all agree the current situation is unacceptable. We have in front of us the government rolling out some new legislation which proposes to make changes to student financial assistance. It looks very good on the surface. But I am hoping we can dig more deeply here today and discover exactly what this government is rolling out. I know the former government was presented with a couple of different approaches, and they chose to support a different approach than this government is currently bringing before it. I would like to discuss the two different approaches, see which was the more equitable of the approaches, and see if we cannot talk about that.

I know we sometimes choose to support things we think we can find the political support for. But I think that is just a euphemism for the road of least resistance. I really do not think that is in the best interest of students of the Northwest Territories. I am going to be asking the Minister responsible for Education some questions about this later today. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.