Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a number of issues that I want to cover with the Minister on this general comments area, but this Aurora College capital planning hiccup keeps coming back here and I feel that I need to jump into that just to state my position on this as well. As I listen to debates going back and forth, I think that the information that we have so far, whether it be through the community's work or what we know from talking to each other and so on, there has not been enough concrete, objective, rational information as to how these capital projects have jumped the queue, so to speak. Some of them were not there last year, or some were in later years, and now we are looking at expenditure requests in many future years for millions of dollars for the renovation of very old buildings. So there is a question about old and new, but there are also questions about how we determine the need and what hoops does it have to get through to have this capital project get on the books. We don't want to see a situation like this where capital projects just jump in out of nowhere.
The demands that we have been hearing about have mostly been in Inuvik and Yellowknife. So we have a question between where the capital need is for Aurora College between the three campuses. Then we have a question about should we be spending the scarce...Well, not whether or not to spend it, but how do we make the priority decision about what Mr. McLeod mentioned, for example, in schools versus housing for adults? How do we prioritize that? If we have problems like that on reserves for low grade schools, the Mildred Hall renovation project has been in need for decades. Regardless of what my colleague from North Slave says, that school was built in 1965. It's almost as old as me. It's in need of renovation and that project had to struggle for years to get on the books. As it is already, the money that has been provided is not enough to meet the emergency occupational standards I would think -- and I don't mean any ill to any college or anything -- that if you have to prioritize and you have to look at the basic level of support you have to give, I would think that facilities for primary grades come before housing for adults. I don't know what programs there are for adults or kids out of high school or people who go to Aurora College, whatever age they might be. I don't know what sort of financial help they get to go to school here and provide for their housing. The students who go to Fort Smith, perhaps this is an opportunity. If we don't spend this money to renovate and if we don't build another one right away, this could be an opportunity to create a private market in Smith if government subsidizes housing while they go to school there. It could be an opportunity for the private sector to jump in and build apartments.
It's really hard for us to say this jumped in, appearing out of nowhere it seems, when we have heard for years about the lack of housing for students in Yellowknife for Aurora Campus. It really speaks to the question about how we determine the needs of different campuses within the college, but also as it compares to basic school facilities for grade schools. So far, it seems to me, that we haven't gotten conclusive evidence or even reasonable evidence or background information to argue for this capital expenditure. I think the Minister has a challenge on his hands to explain himself and convince us of that. Maybe the Minister might want to comment on that.