Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do not want to repeat a bunch of things that have already been said by my colleagues, but there are some areas of concern I would like to bring up in general comments.
If there is anything I can support easily, it is extra money into education. It is pretty hard to look at new initiatives in education or extra funding with any negativity, but it does create some problem as I do have with the whole budget this time as to where the money is coming from and how long we are going to be able to maintain it.
We know from where we were a year ago to now, we are putting another $9 million into education. We can introduce a whole bunch of programs with that. I would certainly hope, Mr. Chairman, that we are not setting up a whole bunch of programs just to, in a year from now, have to start pulling money out of them because we cannot afford to keep up with the programs that we have put in place.
I know there are a lot of energies and strategies being put into our young people and the importance of starting them off on the right foot and I agree with that. I think that is very important. However, we are still seeing letters coming across our desk that say young...(Microphone turned off)...are not being able to access any funding to continue the support. When they try to access funding, they get pushed around back to this department, to the federal government, to Health and Social Services. It just seems to be a go-around where they can never get any funding. We have ones right now that are on the verge of closing up because they just cannot access any funding. I think if we are going to be serious in this area, then somewhere we have to be able to fund these programs.
There is also a part in that which has been brought to my attention. Although we do want to start our kids and have them ready for learning when they hit school, there are still parents who would like their kids just to be kids for the first few years of their lives, and not necessarily start a system that we are putting them in school at three-years-old or two-years-old and have them two years ahead of every other kid that starts at kindergarten or grade one.
If we are going to start that system and have it in place, then we are going to have to have the support staff in the schools to help the ones that are maybe not as prepared to start learning, or their attention spans are not quite as long as other kids. We do not want to set up a system where we basically have the same thing as we have now in some cases.
The system we have allows kids to go along until grade 9, and they just basically go along with the rest of them, whether they are at the same grade level or not. I think it goes a long way to saying why we lose so many kids between grades 10 and 12. They hit high school and all of a sudden they have to have good study habits, they have to be able to write exams, they have to get marks. In many cases, they just do not have what it takes to meet that grade level. We lose an awful lot of kids who do not end up graduating because the support staff has not been there through their earlier years in school.
I do not think that is going to change, Mr. Chairman. That is going to stay there regardless of how many programs we put out at a younger age. That difference in learning ability is going to be there. We are going to have to put the extra help in the classrooms to help these kids along.
We know that we are losing a lot of teachers in the North, and recruitment and retention is big. I know that the department and education boards went on a big recruitment and I think that was great. I made a statement in the House the other day that I had to clarify myself on a little bit, because to some people it sounded like I was maybe a little critical of the drive they went on. That was not the case. I thought that had to be done, and I think it was an important recruitment effort.
At the same time, there were also some incidents brought to my attention where we have qualified teachers here that have applied on jobs and have not even received an interview. They are people who live in the North and qualified teachers. I think that if we have those people, if it is one or two, it is too many. I think that we have to be able to identify those and hire them and put them to work.
Student financial assistance is a problem. We have heard that it has been very big on our agenda for a long time. Even though it was overhauled about a year ago, it only created some more problems because it got too complicated and too lengthy to try to apply, and the kids were having a hard time understanding. The biggest concern of all was trying to get hold of somebody to find out the information and get help.
The students are out there and they are phoning a number and all they get is an answering machine. Nobody is returning any calls. In checking with Hay River and people that administer the program there, they do not have a problem with it being in Yellowknife. I certainly would not want it farmed out to the regions that we have right now anyway.
I do think there can be some improvement made at headquarters as far as having people there to help students and to help parents when they are phoning to find out about the student financial assistance.
We talk a lot about maximizing northern employment. I think that is very important. It is an area that I think that I have had some concerns about for a long time. We talk about bringing our graduates back to the North and putting them to work here. Now that we have some activity in the North and are able to do that, I think we could take that one step further.
I think we could look back over the past five years and look at the kids that we have educated in the North, and this government has paid to educate a lot of kids. The kids who came back to the North and were qualified, who were educated in certain fields, they could not get work in the North. They ended up going south again to find employment. Not because they did not want to work in the North. They just did not have the work here. For some of them, it was for different reasons, but I think that there are still some kids out there whose parents are still living in the North and working here. I think that a lot of those parents would like to retire in the North, but there is not much here to hold them if their kids are working down south.
If we could bring those kids back, we might be holding some of those parents here as well. Those are very important to the fabric of the Northwest Territories.
We have teachers who have been here a long time. They have contributed to our communities. If we could keep them here in their retirement age, they would still do a lot of good for the Territories.
Oil and gas training in the oil and gas sector, I think there is room there for the government to take that one step further where it is bringing money back to the Territories as well. When we are training, especially in safety training, right now there are only outfits in the south that have set the standards for safety training for employees in the oil and gas sector. I do not see why this government cannot set the standards they would have to meet to work in the oil patch, in the oil field. That money that is paid for training employees comes back to this government and does not go south. I think there is a lot of money going south that this government could keep right here in the Territories. I think there is room to move and move quickly.
One of the areas I have talked about in the House many times is the area of seniors and the disabled. I am happy to see that there is extra money going in there for our seniors and our disabled. The subsidies that are going in there will go a short ways towards alleviating some of their problems. I am sure Mr. Roland could tell us that the extra activity in Inuvik, although it is great for the area and has created a lot of economic activity, it has certainly driven the price up of everything in Inuvik. That goes across the whole spectrum. It goes to seniors and disabled, and they end up paying the extra prices. Although we are putting the extra money in, we may not have been meeting their full needs as well.
Those are some of the areas I have some concerns with. I will deal some more as we go through detail. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.