Well, Madam Chair, I have to tell you that I have listened to every word the Minister said. I don't think this round was really any clearer, or more enlightening, than the last three rounds. I have to tell you that this is just not good enough. Madam Chair, he used to ask questions in this House about the need to spend inclusive money. Even in the first two years of him being a Minister, every time we asked questions about is the money for special needs spent the way they are supposed to be, every time we mentioned it, he'd flaunt this long piece of document that says accountability framework or something. I'm sure I'm going to have to get research to go back and do research on how many promises made about how every dollar we are approving is going to special needs funding. Now he is telling me that there are people in schools who are supposed to know what the needs are. We are going to do it the way we are. We don't know what the needs are. We don't know if the 20 percent is going to meet it. We don't know if the 20 percent is meeting 100 percent or 40 percent who need this help. Are we meeting 90 percent of it? Are we meeting 10 percent of it? Do we know who needs full-time aid? If we don't know, what kind of tests should we do to figure out who needs a full-time aid? Why is it that when a child needs a full-time aid one year with the same condition next year, that child doesn't need a full-time aid but nobody there it's their objective qualified to tell me why that changed? If you listen to him, he makes it sound like it's not my fault that I didn't know a school board was spending special needs money on kindergarten. Holy cow! Where is the accountability here, Madam Chair?
We know that school boards are elected, as well. I know that we are dealing with teachers. Teachers have a say on how these programs should be managed. In the interest of getting something done on this very important area that I am determined to clarify, I would like to know if he would engage with the district and come up with the best ideas about how to figure out what the needs are, and how do we know that every penny we are spending and the amount of money that we are spending is making a difference. If it is not, why not? What are the possible options we could look at, as legislators, to make sure that we are making some difference with the extra money that we are adding? The Minister cannot just come back and say more money will do it if he has no idea what difference it is making. I would like to know what the possibility is of some kind of system policy that we could think of with the help of heads of DEAs, education boards and whatever professionals he wants to refer to. We need to have a package that really addresses how we are going
to do this better. Could I ask the Minister to bring that to us in the next Social Programs committee? Thank you.