Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I, too, am happy to see some of the emphasis being placed on similar areas.
I want to start with early childhood development and child care. I’ll be looking for some of the following points. We need to support the training of early childhood education workers. To be able to do that, we need to pay replacements while that training happens and organize accessible community-based training as well. We need to support a territorial early childhood education association so that the GNWT has someone to communicate with on policy issues like this and that
will help alleviate the shortage of affordable quality child care and ECE opportunities.
We need to review criteria and the process for child care subsidies so that more people can take advantage of this. I know there are cases where we have two-income families who are really working poor and still can’t access these subsidies. We need to ensure that child care centres are also not penalized by late payment of subsidies. This has been a perennial problem. I’m hoping the department has addressed that.
Finally we need to review operational funding so that centres are not penalized when children are sick or otherwise absent, and I’ll be mentioning that again later.
I was particularly pleased to see the increase in support to the arts and cultural programs. Again, just some of the things I’ll be looking for and perspectives that I have on this that I’m hoping are reflected in the allocation of this additional funding and possible future funding. I think culture and the arts are really an economic engine and a real source for economic diversity, one of our goals. Municipalities that adopt culture as an industry have gained positive economic benefits for their communities. Cultural industries create job growth, turn ordinary cities or communities into destination cities, create interconnections between arts and business, revitalize urban centres, attract skilled workers and create spin-off businesses. These are proven relationships.
The arts have been instrumental in facilitating social cohesion, bringing tourism to unlikely places, fostering a sense of belonging and preserving collective memory, basically building community. Arts and culture are powerful tools with which to engage communities in various levels of change. They are a means to public dialogue, they contribute to the development of communities’ creative learning, they create healthy communities capable of action, and they provide a powerful tool for community mobilization and activism that help build community capacity and leadership.
They’re a factor in quality of life and quality of place, and these are priorities that I see are at least as important as economic development. Culture, long overlooked as a tool for garnering quality of life, is now being recognized as the means to community building, encouraging outdoor activity and healthy lifestyles, lifelong learning, increasing accessibility to programs for all levels of society and celebrating diversity and cultural differences. Finally, the ability to engage and motivate children and youth from all socio-economic levels in education and community is a respected strength of arts and culture and particularly relevant to our communities.
On the introductory remarks under Advanced Education and Careers, College Programs, the Minister noted that tens of millions of dollars are being provided towards certificates, diplomas, degrees and trade programs relevant to the NWT labour market. That’s not something I disagree with, but I would say that we don’t want to be just reactive here. It would be nice to be proactive and see not just where the economy is demanding right now but what direction the economy and society are moving in and where the jobs are likely to be given the issues that we’re dealing with today and in the near future. I think there are some obvious ones there.
Under Adult Literacy and Basic Education I see we’re maintaining our support there. We did have a very interesting series of workshops and talks with a national expert in this area.
I think there were some interesting relationships revealed there where we could get even bigger returns from a little bit more of an investment in literacy and adult education.
I’m hoping we can see a gradually increased level of support in this area. I say “gradually,” because sometimes it’s most effective, in terms of building programs, to increase resources very gradually rather than one big lump sum. And then about the time we have capacity built up to use that effectively, we’re taking resources away. But again, based on all I’ve learned — and I know you’ve got lots of experts in the department — that seems like some real potential for some win-wins. I’m going to leave my introductory remarks at that. Thank you for this opportunity.