Mahsi, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank the Minister and his staff for meeting with us today to go over the ECE's main estimates. Just a couple of points on his opening remarks. Again, I would just like to say that I'm glad to see that there's a lot of new money going into a lot of old issues with Education, Culture and Employment. It's good to see they're meeting these head on with a lot of new initiatives that they're coming out with. A lot of these old issues have been ongoing for some time and I'm sure a lot of students out there and families would be happy with these main estimates that have come out. It's good to see that there's more money in childcare all the way around and the childcare subsidies for students, which has always been a real barrier to a lot of education being thrown out the door, a lot of education dollars going to waste because students are just not completing courses or just can't cope with childcare costs and childcare in general in Fort Smith, or in Yellowknife or in Inuvik. Hopefully these subsidies will alleviate that for a lot of potential students out there.
Just to touch on one of the points that my friend Ms. Lee was talking about, the summer students issue, not just in relation to nurses but to summer students in general. I received a lot of letters, e-mails and phone calls from summer students who have been residents of the NWT all their lives and are in post-secondary education in the South, and a few of them have completed their post-secondary education and have sent out numerous applications to government agencies all over the place and have never received replies, or have never received any meaningful employment for the summer or just employment in general. I just wanted to make the Minister aware of that.
Great to see the Aboriginal Language and Culture Instructor Program being a full-time course now. It's been a long debated issue whether it was viable or not and I'm glad that will help enhance and make the aboriginal languages in the NWT a little more exposed, I guess, for NWT residents and for people that want to pursue instructor certification on that level to teach their own language to their own people. I think that's a really good initiative and something that's way overdue and I just really have to commend the department for pushing forward on that one.
Just a point on the Aurora College in Fort Smith, Inuvik and Yellowknife, I just got some feedback from community
members and organizations on why we just don't use those facilities all year round to their maximum potential use. I know in the summer you wouldn't have to heat them at all, a lot of them. Very minimal amounts of power would be used during the summer months, which a lot of, I think, training programs and a lot of summer student courses probably could be carried out in these facilities. I've visited them in the summertime and they are huge facilities and there are one or two staff members there, but basically they're all empty for about two or three months of the year. I think that we should utilize these facilities to either provide NGOs with training facilities or provide community organizations with the authority to request a classroom for two or three months to hold workshops and whatnot, on a user-pay perhaps. I just think that they should be put to 100 percent use all year round.
Other than that, all the educational facilities across the NWT, the 65 that he did mention in his opening statement, I have to agree with the Minister that they are nearing the end of their operational life. There are a lot of them where, I think, we are putting more money into upgrades and minor renovations and I know that a lot of them are going to be up on the priority list of capital projects, many of which will probably be going into, I'm not sure if the Education capital projects are going to be going into the capital investment plans for communities, that they're going to be responsible for to some degree. Maybe the Minister could edify me on that.
Overall, I'm happy with education being a high priority of this government, given the highly technical and professional jobs that are here in the NWT now. Even though we do have to look back and re-instil the importance of trades in our economy and in our small communities, I think the ECE has definitely taken up that challenge by reinstating the trades access programs and the trades programs in high schools. I don't even know how they left the schools in the first place, but that's not to be argued because to get them back, I think it's great. That's just one class that was one of my favourite classes in high school, in junior high, so I really look forward to getting a lot of good Grade 12 students moving on to trades programs after this gets off the ground. I really have to, again, commend the department for taking on a lot of these long-outstanding issues of education and income support and everything like that. With that, I'll just complete my statement. If the Minister would like to respond, he can. Thank you.