Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are a lot of important topics under this department, and we are approving quite a large sum of money for $259 million, so I think there will be lots of things to talk about. I am going to start with the first one coming out of the Minister's opening statement. It is in regards to special needs funding, Mr. Chair.

I am happy to see that we are, once again, going to be increasing the funding for special needs. I think it might have been as low as about seven percent when I came into this House six years ago. I think we are looking at increasing it to about 15 percent here. There is no question that the amount of dollars will go a long way, but now I am thinking that we need to do a better job. The Minister and the department will have to do a better job of tightening this program to see that we are dealing with what it is that we are trying to deal with, which is, that I think, we have undefined and an almost overwhelming need of special needs issues in our Territories. I think we all have an instinctive feeling that we are probably not addressing as much of that as we would like. We are increasing dollars on that, but I am not sure if we have a clear picture about what the scope is of the challenge that we are dealing with. I have to tell you that I was quite surprised to hear from someone speaking in local media from one of the school boards saying now that we have more money for kindergarten funding, which is a good thing, we are finally funding kindergarten. We have made it legal with the passage of the legislation a couple of months ago. Now that we are going to be putting money in there for full time kindergarten. I guess we have always suspected that school systems were finding money from within to pay for the kindergarten that the school boards were...school boards made the decision to provide for, but were not being funded for. I had no idea that some of the special needs money might have been spent to fund kindergarten. I have no idea of knowing if that is true or not. I want to give the Minister a chance to explain that. What is it that he is doing now to make sure that, in fact, the money that we are allocating for special needs are going to special needs? What sort of picture does he have as to the needs for special needs in school?

I know that the NWT Teachers' Association, when they came and spoke before the committee, they spoke about the need for additional resources for special needs, but especially for those who need one-on-one care. In listening to the Minister's statement, there is a vast spectrum of special needs that we need to deal with. It could be from someone whose English is not the first language or someone who just has learning difficulties, right up to those who need one-on-one care. I think there is also a question about where do the special needs, from an educational perspective, start and end, and when do the medical special needs for any child start and end. I think there is so much there.

It is surprising to learn that the last directive on inclusive schooling from the Minister was back in 1996. It is almost 10 years old, especially in light of the fact that, for every year for the last six years, we have been increasing funding on special needs and to know that that was actually done in sort of a vacuum, that is a surprise, too. There are lots of things on the workload there on the special needs file. This is something that I am very interested in. I would like to see this really tightened up in the not-too-distant future, hopefully by this summer. I will

just ask the Minister to respond to that and then move on from there. Thank you.