Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I've been listening with some interest to the Minister's remarks and I'm looking through his other opening remarks, as well, and I'm pleased to see that he's been quite responsive to a lot of committee work that's happening, as well as concerns from the Members. Once again, Education, Culture and Employment, our department plays a large role in the constituents I represent. I've got six communities and, for the most part, every part of the Minister's ministry kind of impacts how I do business in the Nahendeh riding.
Firstly, with early childhood development, we've got to spend as much resources as we can, and some of that federal money the sooner we get her into the system, the better we can address the needs of our new and young population and their children as they start to begin their journey through our school system.
Part of my job, as a legislator, is to help the ministry identify some problems with the schooling system and help them design systems that will work. In my communities we've got small schools and in 2002 there was a small schools report issued. As I read through it, there are lots of considerations that our department should be leaning towards when addressing our schooling system. In larger centres, you've got many, many teachers that are teaching different courses, but in the smaller schools you basically have a man and wife team running all ages in the schooling system. In fact, the funding for the small schools is quite unique, too. Like, you offer somebody like a .25 janitor, what does that mean? So just to bear in mind those difficulties. I'm not quite sure how much work the ministry has done with the small schools report in order to address some of its recommendations and improving the system with that respect.
Early in my term, too, I approached the Minister in the House and lobbied him, as well, to encourage and to allow our teachers to learn an aboriginal second language; in fact, to be skilled enough to learn and to teach it in the schools. We use lots of local people in our school system and the Minister told me that when the teachers go for secondary training or else for upgrading their skills, that it was based on 80 percent of their pay. I also indicated to the Minister that when there's a lack or when there's a gap, in order to fulfill that gap we offer more of an incentive and, in fact, I think just about at that time we wanted more lawyers in the north and I think anybody that wanted to do that, we offered, like, 100 percent of their pay to attend school to become lawyers. Yet when we're asking for aboriginal second language teachers, we only offered them 80 percent of pay when they went to school. So I was saying, well, it's a huge gap. I see there are some new initiatives now in the newspapers to have teachers of Dene as a second language, and I'd like to say that's a good thing and that's the kind of thing that we need in our education system, as well. We have to bend over backwards for aboriginal teachers, fund them and allow them to learn and become teachers of Dene as a second language. That's an identified gap in the schools. So that's something that I really am supportive of and I still want to press that, because, recently, I was back home and talking about this very subject, and again, it was pointed out that the gaps there. I said, well, I've done some work on it, but I forgot one of the tenants or one of the rules, as an MLA, is that I have to keep talking about it. Just because I stopped talking about it doesn't mean that the problem went away. So I just thought I would revive that with the Minister and say, look, it's still a priority for my teachers in my region to have one of our official languages endorsed in our union system, or whatever it is, to allow training in our official languages.
Another thing that's going to have a big impact is a reduction of the students' age for funding when they're attending our school system. It doesn't really affect the student, but it affects the programming that our schools are able to, and the resources that they give towards teaching older students, I guess, adult learners as it were, Mr. Chair. So I'm not quite sure of the impact, but I know that anyone over the age of, I think, 21 years old, our schools aren't going to be funded for them. I'm just not quite sure if the Minister found another way in order to fill that gap, as well, to provide the resources to our teachers and to our schools to allow more adult learners in our schools, because it's a good thing that they're doing to allow that to happen and I'd like to see it encouraged, but I'm just not quite sure in what direction our ECE is spending in order to allow this to continue.
One other great area of concern for me is I know the Minister and the government has moved the Public Housing Subsidy Program over to ECE starting April 1st, but I still have grave concerns about that. I know that they've been actively advertising and trying to get public discussion on it in getting the rental clients open to meetings to explain the new program for them, but I think my fear is that a lot of them, for whatever reason right now, are eligible for the subsidies from the LHOs, but I'm not entirely convinced, Mr. Chair, that moving it over to ECE...I don't know what kind of guidelines they have for providing rent scale subsidies, if they're going to use the current system, which for other income support programs, I'm not quite sure. Perhaps if the Minister can respond to me exactly how the application process is going to be. Let's say client A who makes $1,200 a month, exactly how that person would fit or benefit from moving the public housing subsidy over to ECE. I'm thinking that somebody in the $1,200 to $1,800 range will not benefit from this, because given the old income support guidelines, they're making, I think, the poverty level. They're making enough that they don't need assistance from the corporation or from ECE, but I know for sure that they're out there, they're single parents, they have one or two children and they're just struggling as it is. So I don't want to further burden them. I'm not quite sure what kind of phone calls I'll be getting after April 1st when they start filling out their applications and getting it into a system for public housing subsidy.
So those are my initial concerns, Mr. Chair, and I'll be pleased if the Minister can comment on some of the important areas that I covered. Mahsi.