Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we always stress the importance of educating our children. On January 29th, I was honoured to take part in the Beaufort-Delta Education Council's long-term service awards that were held in Inuvik. I was also proud of the fact that we had Ministers Roland, Dent and Krutko join us. It was a good opportunity to honour those that made long-term commitments to the professions and to the North. Mr. Speaker, honoured for 10 years of service -- and these are some constituents of Inuvik -- were: Rosa Kayotuk, Mary Connelly, Donna Maring; 15 years of service, Wayne Allen, Sandra Ipana, Sarah Jerome; 25 years of service was Catherine Ross; and 30 years of service, Mr. Speaker, was Sylvia Musselwhite. A common theme that I hear from a lot of people who decided to make the North their home was that they decided they would come up for one or maybe two years, and they end up staying here for 30, 40 years, the rest of their life. They fall in love with the country or they fall in love with somebody that keeps them here.
Mr. Speaker, I was also proud of the fact that we are seeing more and more aboriginal teachers being honoured for long-term service award.
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That is a by product of the Teacher Education Program they started a few years ago and now they have expanded that into the Bachelor of Education. I have
three sisters-in-law that have their Bachelor of Education. I have a fourth one that is working on it right now. So I think it is very important that we continue to honour people who have made long-term commitments to the North and start honouring our aboriginal teachers because they will be in the field for a while.
Mr. Speaker, we are going to need to keep educating our children because they are going to have to be the ones that are taught how to divide up the resource revenue sharing money that we are going to get from Ottawa. Thank you.
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