Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was wondering if the clock was going to tick through as they were doing their math.
I think from what I have heard so far, it appears that the makeup of the population using student financial assistance is actually representative of the population in the territories, or fairly close to representative. I think that is a good sign.
It means we have people from across the territories accessing the program. I, Mr. Chairman, would like to encourage the department to take a real good look at rewarding success, for those young people, and some not so young, who have been successful in the system, who have gone out and shown the initiative to undertake higher learning.
I think we should be willing to take the initiative to help them go on and complete their course of study. If that means giving them an extra two years of grant and remissible loan support to help them get to a graduate degree, or if it means that somebody will qualify for four years of funding instead of two years at that level of support, then I think it is important. We need well-educated people to come back to the Northwest Territories to take on some of the job opportunities that we are going to have open up here in the not-too-distant future.
I would really like to encourage the department to take another look at these numbers. I am not convinced that as many people would follow on as they believe would. There is probably room to extend this program.
For instance, when we were going through the department business plan, in committee, we pointed out that there has been a significant amount of money lapsed in student financial assistance last year. We were told that was based on 75 to 90 students, a variance, and therefore there can always be this kind of variance. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that were lapsed last year.
If there is that kind of variance here, I suspect the department is being overly cautious when they present the numbers. I would really encourage them to relax the rules. If that leads us to a situation where they have to come back for supplementary funding, then let us talk about that at that time. Because if we are in fact rewarding success, I think Members of this House will be inclined to agree that is the way we should be doing business. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.