Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, the allowance is the same.

I think that goes to the inequities we are talking about here. I don't think anybody would argue that Yellowknife is one of the most expensive places to live in the Territories. To come to school here, you get the same amount of student financial assistance as elsewhere. I am going to end the topic of Aurora College and come back around for other issues. Thank you.

I don't have any further comments, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. I would like to get back to the issue of standardized testing and, indeed, transparency with the results and the discussion of the results that we see or do not see in some cases in education. I guess I will start by indicating my frustration in the last three years in sitting through numerous presentations by the department through the business planning cycle in the Standing Committee on Social Programs. We know that standardized testing is being done more or less standard across various districts, but at the Grade 3, Grade 6 and Grade 9 levels. We know there are departmental Alberta exams being taught at the high school level and kids are taking them and passing them, and we know what our results on those exams are because I have been able to get the information when my office has asked for it. We know that we have a huge number of students who have special needs in the Northwest Territories, but it does not seem to be something that we document very well.

I could not tell you, in sitting through these business planning cycles in the last three years, if we are getting better or worse. I have no idea. I mean, I do not know if we are doing better in departmental exams this year than we did two years ago or worse. I do not know if we have more students presenting with special needs at kindergarten are fewer. I do not know if our results are getting better at grades 3, 6 and 9. It is not something that certainly the department presents, in my opinion, to standing committee in a manner where we can actually see trends and talk about results.

I hate to give the Department of Health and Social Services a pat on the back, but when Health and Social Services comes in they present information like the number of people smoking in the Northwest Territories. It is horrible. We talk about the incidents of STDs and it is terrible, as are communicable diseases. Our rates are right off the charts compared to other jurisdictions, but we talk about them. We can sit down with the Minister and we can say here is where the bar is. Now, let us talk about achievable goals in the next five years. Let us talk about where we might make some headway. The benefit of that is at the end of a term you can sit down with the Minister, you can assess the progress that has been made, you can talk about why progress has been made or has not been made, and you have something to measure yourself by. I find myself without an ability to discuss our goals and to actually track them and to monitor our progress.

It feels like we are just sort of stuck in quicksand here in education and we are sitting here treading water, because I do not know if we are getting better or worse. It might be the case, Mr. Chairman, that we are doing better than Alberta students are doing. Anecdotally I do not think we are, but even if we are not it could be the case that we are making great strides and getting closer to closing that gap. I guess the bottom line is, Mr. Chairman, I have no idea because that is not something that we discuss in the business planning cycle in committee. That is not something that we talk about. I do not know why we do not talk about it, because I know we are able to glean this information when I ask for it privately. I get very comprehensive information from the department. They do a very good job in compiling a lot of these statistics.

I do not think this is about blame. I am not indicating that if somehow our marks are going the wrong way on exams that it is the department that is at fault, just as I do not think that somehow if communicable disease rates are up that it is somehow the Department of Health and Social Services( fault and there is something they are doing that is causing these rates to climb. But I do think it is something that we need to talk about because we have to be honest. Starting with ourselves we have to be honest, but we have to be honest with the public because unless we are going to talk about these things we are never going to get a handle on them.

I guess I would just like to state my frustration with the lack of analysis of trends, the lack of goal setting as I see it. Maybe, to be quite honest, Mr. Chairman, maybe it is being done and it is just not being communicated very well to committee. That may indeed be the case. I think we certainly have a role to play in talking with our constituents and talking to people at the grass-roots level about the kinds of results we are seeing or not seeing and so, therefore, I think the department has a key role to play in involving us in much of this work.

Again, as I say, it is not about trying to blame somebody, but it is about accountability. I would like to see this department improve in its presentation of information to committee, especially in those areas of standardized testing at grades 3, 6 and 9 and departmental exams. For goodness sake, we have to know how many kids are presenting with special needs. It is not enough to say we presume we have higher levels than the South and we cannot quite compare funding across jurisdictions. We know it is bad. I mean, we do not even know if it is getting any better. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. Minister Ootes.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is no doubt that that would be valuable for us to be able to present more information publicly. One of the challenges we have consistently faced on this is standardized tests. It is hard to put information out there when the tests are not standardized. It is hard to compare. Even on a national basis, Mr. Chairman, we have had numerous discussions amongst the Ministers of Education across Canada about the consistency of tests. We do the national tests, the SAIP tests. They started about eight to ten years ago. We are getting consistency in the Alberta achievement tests.

I certainly take to heart what the Member is saying and would simply follow through with what he is suggesting, that we do need to get out there and provide more information to show our accountability. That is the question, is the accountability and we require a lot of feedback from each of the jurisdictions in order to do that because each jurisdiction gives us an accountability report, but in some cases over the past decade those reports have been wildly inconsistent in terms of the types of tests that are taken. It is always hard to compare apples and apples, so it has had its challenges.

I do not disagree with the Member that the Members should be involved in this. We do not want to hide information. We do not want to obscure information to the public deliberately to try and say we have the information, but we do not want to put it out there. That is not the point. We want to put the information out there that we know ourselves makes some sense to put together whereby we can say this is a problem, that is a problem. You know, there are some reports that are of value. We did the Towards Excellence report and our post-secondary indicators report. So our reporting in some areas is really good. We provide a lot of data. I think the testing area is evolving and one that we need more consistency and more accountability and we will certainly work towards that.

Thank you. Mr. Bell.

Thank you. I am really hopeful that this will become a major focus of the department. I know that internally within the department -- and I can just tell from the information that I have in front of me -- there are some folks doing some really good work and spending what must be a huge amount of time to compile a lot of this very valuable information. I can go through this information and tell you by district, I can look at my own community, I can tell you how we have been doing on Biology 30 exams since 1998. The level of detail is amazing here and I do not believe it is about trying to hide information because in some cases I can see that we are drastically improving.

But this is not something that we talk about. We do not talk enough about the successes. We do not talk enough about the failures. I acknowledge and recognize that statistics and tests are not perfect, are not always accurate and consistent. There may be anomalies. But I am just saying that I think we have to start somewhere. I think we have to start making this information publicly available. When I go on the Alberta education Web site the level of statistics and trends analysis is quite detailed, but it is not anything that this department is not already doing internally and I can tell that by the level of information they are able to provide me when I ask for it.

I just think we have to do a better job of taking that message to the public and making them aware of the same information that we are aware of. This has been an ongoing frustration for me over the number of years, the three years that I have been here. I have not seen the publicizing of this information. I have not seen the tracking of the trends and it is a problem. It is something that we need to improve on. I think we have to start somewhere and we have to pick something and start every year consistently publicizing it. We have information here going back years. We can talk about how students in the Territories have been doing on Social Studies 30 for the last four years. Specifically, we spent a lot of effort and money raising the special needs funding to 15 percent, because we recognized that we think we have a high proportion of students with special needs. I think all of the teachers would tell you that that is the case. But I can't tell you, as a legislator, whether it makes sense now to re-evaluate our targets from 15 percent and talk about 20 percent, because I don't know what our percentage of special needs are in the classrooms, and I certainly don't know if we're getting better or worse than when we were first elected. I don't know how many kids we suspect might have fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effect. I know it's difficult to adequately access that, but I think we have to take a try at some of these things. If we're going to do our job and make sure the money gets where it's most needed, we have to know what the needs are. In an area like special needs, we know it's bad; we just don't know how bad and we don't know if it's getting worse or better and that's a problem.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Certainly I don't disagree with the Member that we don't talk enough about our successes and our failures. I think that that is a good point that the Member is making. It does require us to take our data and to put it into a better format, because it needs to be in an understandable format as well for the public. I don't disagree with the Member on that. We can certainly do our best in order to concentrate on getting the type of information that the Member is pointing out, because it is important for the Members to have details to make decisions. I need those details in order to make decisions. There's always a challenge, Mr. Chair, because as the Member has referenced, when we do FAS/FAE, that is not a simple diagnosis. That's an expensive diagnosis. A medical doctor has to do that. These are the kinds of hurdles we seem to face on an ongoing basis when we compile data. We have to be accurate with the data, too, Mr. Chair. We can't just estimate, as we've done some time ago where we had a large percentage of FAS/FAE students in our schools. That percentage couldn't be substantiated because testing hadn't been done. In order to achieve the testing, which we're doing now, Health and Social Services is working on that for early childhood areas. These are all things we need to take into account when we do accountability reports. But I don't disagree with the Member that in order for him, as well as the other Members, to make decisions, to have input, they need data. They need information that they can count on. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I'm glad to hear the Minister refer to information that we have and meeting that detail, because our decisions we make as Members of the Assembly are only as good as the information that we're given. Just on that portion, Mr. Chairman, in different responses throughout this afternoon around the facilities that were in question, the residences, we've heard about the fire marshal being involved and an order being made that would impact projects going ahead. Then later on the Minister talked about stripping and refurbishing, which to me isn't much more than sprucing up of a facility.

Again, Mr. Chairman, we as legislators need to base our decisions on good information. The information that we received a number of months ago on capital plans as a government and where facilities and projects fit into that, we've talked at great length about the corporate capital planning process and the importance that plays into how decisions are made now. We're still given the information, and I have to admit, this information is about a year-and-a-half old. But that's what we're given as Members to substantiate how projects are going ahead, and to show how government is doing its expenditures, based on good, critical information.

Just from that, Mr. Chairman, the information I'm given shows the Inuvik student residence replacement in 2005-06, and the two other facilities in Fort Smith starting in 2007-08. Even on top of that, Mr. Chairman, since the committees have wrapped up their draft reviews and made reports, we've seen information change two and three times about that. Even this afternoon when the Minister responded to questions about vacancy rates and so on, again we were given another version of those numbers, slightly changing from what was provided to committee members. So I think that's probably one of the reasons Members would be concerned about the decisions being made, and that at this time we seem to be justifying what's on the books because we have to justify them. It flies in the face of other things that happen.

I say this, Mr. Chairman, from past experience. For example, before I got into this line of work, working in the community of Inuvik and knowing that the Aurora Campus was put into a Canadian Forces service building, I remember years ago being told that the studies showed that the fire marshal could walk into that campus facility and shut it down on a day's notice. That was many years ago. Finally we're at the point where we're going to build a new facility, and we're very thankful for that. I have to make sure that I get that on record. We're thankful for the work that has been done by the department and community of educators we have in Inuvik and in the region.

But when it comes to the decision process here, I have to go home and tell people why things are changing and how they've changed, and substantiate that with the information we're given. But when information seems to change closer to the project and there is not a whole lot of substantiation, I have difficulty going back home and telling my constituents that we failed in this area and we'll hope that they're going to come forward with something. I'm encouraged that the Minister said he'll work with the Housing Corporation to try to deal with that issue. If that's the solution out there, then that's where we need to go. But again, on the information we have at hand, there are some big pieces that have not come to surface yet. The fire marshal's order; well, maybe the Minister can put that on the table. The Minister of Health and Social Services, when it came to his budget and talking about a couple of facilities, put a couple of pretty big documents on the table for Members to review. A lot of numbers and so on, and even those would draw some question as to where things were going. But the budget got approved. He put the information on the table.

Mr. Chairman, when I look at these processes and the information that we're asking as Members to help make decisions, and that information is pretty fluid. It really concerns me that we have all the information. It's natural that as a government we sit and substantiate things. We sit down with departments and committees. There are times -- and many other Members can speak to this -- that we're presented with the picture. But many times we have to dig a little bit more to get a bigger part of the picture. Because what's presented is a snapshot, and that picture doesn't give all the detail. It gives a fair bit of it but not all the detail, and there are some critical pictures. I have concerns with that, because the information I have here -- unless the department or the government overall can give me another 20-year capital plan that's hopefully a month or at least a few months from where we are now -- goes against what we've been given. Now I understand that as we get close to those project dates, that there are other studies and work done to ensure we're still on track and there will be some movement. I take that as being a necessary process.

But I've also learned that I have to ask some detailed questions to get the information, especially when it affects our facilities in the Northwest Territories. I agree, we have to protect those investments. We've been far short on capital dollars for too many years and, unfortunately, that doesn't look like it's going to change in the near future. We've managed to spend over $100 million, almost $200 million extra since we've started just on O and M. We've maybe added $20 million to the capital program, and that's going to drop off for the next government, unfortunately, unless we find bags of money in another location.

So, Mr. Chairman, just raising my concerns with the information that we've been provided and trying to make decisions, I would hope that as we go through that, as we get into detail when the capital program comes up, maybe the Minister can substantiate some of this further. Again, the information I have as a Member to base my decisions on shows there's been quite a bit of jumping and changing around here. I mean it's hard for me as a Member who tries to look at things on an even playing field, to see these kinds of changes coming up the last year of our mandate, and still going home to say we're working on something. But my constituents come back and say well, what happened over here that a program jumped a couple of years in advance compared to what was in the books? The information I have to date, I only can agree with them that that's what happened.

Mr. Chairman, I guess just in closing about the campus facility, I was a Member many years ago and I took an apprenticeship through this government and I attended AVTC as it was called then -- Aurora College -- and I stayed in the Breynat Hall as a young man and was bunked up with two other individuals in Breynat Hall because that's the way it was built. It was built for that purpose. Because we want to build things to make it a little more comfortable for individuals, we're going to great expense for comfort. I think we have to look at more than comfort. That plays a bit in the quality of education, but we have to look to the long term for what we can really handle. Is it comfort, or is it necessity to get a program out? I thought that's what libraries were created for, so students could go to a library to study, to have quiet time. But now we're saying that they need it in their little domicile, the place they would call home while they're at school.

There are many questions we can ask about that, but I guess I go back to the fact that our decisions made are only as good as the information we're provided. Hopefully through this process the Minister can come forward with more detail as to why things have changed. Otherwise, as a Member, I have difficulties supporting some of the plans they have in place. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Dent had earlier asked if we could supply some of the documentation, and we'll certainly do that and we'll get that as quickly as possible for the Members so that we can address the issues that may be of concern. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One of the things that I had on my list was the standardization question, and Mr. Bell has covered a lot of them already. But this is something that has been on my mind, as well, and it has to do with standardization or just knowing where our children are at qualitatively. Not just quantitatively, not just is our child in grades 3, 6 and 9, and where are they in Grade 6. If they're in high school, maybe the marks that they're getting in Biology 30 or 33, or Math 30 might tell us something. But there is a question about kids who are being pushed through or put through, because that's the trend.

Before I go on, I just want to qualify by saying that I want to acknowledge a lot of good work is being done by the department. We're sitting here and you're listening to two hours of people talking about what's wrong, and that's not to say that there aren't a lot of good things going on. I think that Minister Ootes has been overseeing this department at a very good time, because he's been getting lots of money to reduce the pupil-teacher ratio. I know that he's working hard and the department is working hard, and it is generally a good news department, as far as education in the public's eyes goes. So I felt compelled to add that.

But there is always the question of whether we are doing the best we can with the money. I get people coming in and parents coming in and saying my kid is in Grade 12 or Grade 10, and you may just get 50 percent of everything and get through, but then maybe you only need 50 percent to pass. But when you're seeing cases where kids are graduating Grade 12 or whatever, but they're really reading at grades 5 or 6 levels, there's our anecdotal evidence. I don't know if that's the prevalent trend, I have no idea.

But we also know that we have a private company providing the most money on literacy programs. We know that looking at what's going on, that we have students graduating without adequate literacy and numeracy levels. I don't think it's unique to the North. I remember being in university where kids getting accepted into university did not have the levels of writing or reading that you would expect in university. So it's a trend that I think is detected everywhere in Canada about the quality of education that we're providing, and what sort of education they're receiving in general. But in the North specifically, we don't have a whole lot of students. We are a very small population, too. I guess we have fewer people working to keep tabs on that, too.

I remember asking the Minister lots of questions about our labour force, because we need to know how many people are there, who's workable, who's employable, who's not, who's in the hospital, who's in jail, who's in school. You know, what is the employable population so that the government can make a decision about how we get ready for what is the target of the population that we're working on and so on. Eventually the Minister came up with lots of information on that. So this is the kind of information we need to know. This parent in this anecdotal evidence had to pursue for a long time to get her child tested, and then she discovered her child was reading at a very, very low level. This child had no problem passing all the way to Grade 12. People don't want to hear about that, but we need to know that.

Another evidence I know is that if you talk to any principal in any school, he or she could give you a pretty good idea about where their students lie. I think every teacher knows when they get their students, 20 or 25 kids at the beginning of the year, they watch them for a while, they study them and they know which kids have behavioral problems, which kids may have FAS/FAE, which kids may have a reading problem. I'm sure the information is out there. I don't know if we need more scientific evidence to show that. But definitely that's an area of concern to me, and it goes in particular to those with special needs. I can't believe when we always talk about the need for additional funding, we don't even have a standardized program on how we fund our special needs funding. We know that we budgeted 15 percent and we give it to the boards, and then it's really frustrating for us to say we have increased special needs funding. Then the parents will come up and say nothing has changed. Every parent has to fight every year at the beginning of the year to get programs for their children with special needs, especially when their kids are going to the same school and they know about it, but still they have to fight all over again to make sure that they get the assistance they need, or they have the right special assistance education and so on. So there is a lack of even a special needs funding policy throughout the territory.

I remember I asked the Minister a while back about how you fund the school board. When you give them 15 percent of the total budget for special needs, what do you ask them to do? Is there a standard that the department provides? The document I got was a policy statement on inclusionary schooling. That's the policy, and it was a photocopy of something from years back. I was really quite surprised. I see that there is no policy statement from the government. I think in departments like Health or Education, where you're working through the boards, the essential role of the government and the department as an essential body is to establish policy or standards to make sure that the money is being spent the way you want it to, and also that you're able to report back to the House about where it went.

Also I think if it is the case that 50 percent of our children are going to need special needs funding or special needs assistance or something, we have to get ready for that. We may have to create a program to train more special needs assistants at Aurora College. The need is at the other extreme, too. I talked to parents in Range Lake North School, for example, where students need special needs assistants to read, or they may have a clinical diagnosis that needs special needs, or some kids just might need help with reading or numeracy or something, then you have kids who are gifted. There are other kids at the other end of special needs who need other attention as well.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should ask the Minister and the department about whether there is someone or a section in the department that administers and sets standards on how the special needs funding, that 15 percent of the total budget, goes to school boards, and how do you check to see what happens to that 15 percent special needs funding?

Thank you. The Member has covered a lot of areas here with regard to the special needs funding, Mr. Chair. Certainly I would agree that accountability is an important element of any funding that we do. We've been working on a framework for accountability, or concentrated on one. We do get annual reports from the school boards back to us, and in some cases it has a lot of detail in it, in other cases it doesn't have as much detail. We need to continue to work on that, Mr. Chair, to ensure that we do get the kinds of answers, for example, that the Member is bringing up, that we do get an appropriate accounting in detail on all of the expenditures. However, I should point out that the school boards have been very good, very consistent with providing us some detailed business plans and reporting back to us. It is certainly an area that we appreciate the boards on. I think they can go somewhat further. We can demand more, and certainly we'll do that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One question about Aurora College housing and the obvious need in Yellowknife. The Minister has indicated that it makes more sense to talk about a purpose built facility at some point that would encompass housing as well. But in the meantime, we have a real shortage of housing. We know in Inuvik the college has been able to cooperate with the private sector and enter into some leases to get the Blueberry Patch. In Yellowknife, that's private sector housing at Northern United Place that was leased, I guess, in a block for the college. Students who are fortunate enough to get into those units pay a special college rate for those housing units in Northern United Place, but presumably they use their student financial assistance to do that and there's some subsidization over and above. Now if you have to get your own private housing in a community, you also use your student financial assistance to do that but there's no subsidization. If that is indeed the case, then really you are fortunate to get into college housing because you're in a much different situation than someone who didn't make it onto the list.

I guess I would ask in dealing with the short-term need, why wouldn't we look at landlords in the city who might be willing to enter into an arrangement with us to lease us blocks of housing somewhere in the downtown core for five years, 10 years, something like this so that we can provide college housing on a temporary basis in this form and not have to have students rely on going and finding their own private accommodations and use their student financial assistance for that. Maybe the Minister can indicate why we haven't looked at some sort of an arrangement with other landlords, or if indeed he'd be amendable to pursuing options that would allow us to meet this housing demand on a short-term basis until we had some more comprehensive, broader, larger plan in place in future years whenever we find the capital dollars for something like this.