Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a few general comments on the Department of Education. I’m pleased that there’s going to be $1
million spent on children and youth in the
department. That’s an important aspect for some of the smaller communities. The two small communities that I represent don’t really have a stable place where they can run their daycare and so on, so they have a tendency to move around a bit. It will be good to see the department pay close attention to making sure that daycare is available in the smaller communities on a consistent basis. It’s not really available on a consistent basis. I’m not sure that the full magnitude of what that causes is really apparent, because often when daycare is not available it’s an opportunity for people just to stay home with the kids. We need to be able to make those things available — and that’s not occurring — because that has other implications to it.
As far as the pupil/teacher ratio goes, the change in the PTR has very little impact on small communities. I do believe that the change from 16 to 15 allowed the department to add three jobs in the South Slave Education Divisional Council and the southern schools. I’m not sure how the three jobs are distributed, but I’m fairly positive that it’s not going to achieve the thing that’s most important to the schools in Lutselk’e and Fort Resolution, where they’re trying to get some specialized teachers to be able to teach gym and also industrial arts, home economics and whatnot. How this is going to work out…. My assumption is that if a drop of one student for the PTR nets three jobs, then I’m assuming that half a student would net 1.5 jobs. So still, a total over two years is maybe 4.5 jobs. Again, with seven schools — and especially with myself representing the two smallest schools, probably, in that riding, most likely the two smallest schools in that divisional education council — the increases don’t really help. I will ask questions on whether the department has had an opportunity to have — or examined the possibility of having — some sort of base level education standard for the schools regardless of the size and whether they recognize that teaching towards just the curriculum now is basically designed for students to move from the high school education to further post-secondary education, which is maybe not in the trades field and the other physical types of fields.
I’d like to see more specialized teachers put into all of the schools as a base minimum so that everyone has a gym teacher and somebody that can teach them industrial arts and some sort of compromise made at the schools and with the department in order to make that happen. It’s so important to the students that the department shouldn’t just stand by the pupil/teacher ratio and insist that that’s the way problems will be resolved. Those issues will never get resolved by sticking with the same system that has been going on for 20
years in these
communities, where they may have never had a gym teacher, for all I know. There may have been some teachers that were able to teach gym, for example. So it would be good to see the department do some work in that area.
Again, just briefly on another topic: income support and the public housing subsidy. I’m pleased to see that the department is paying some attention to resolving some of the issues there. I would look forward to seeing the results of that within the next few months.
I see a positive thing in the trades support. I think that supporting trades is something that arose from some of the students coming out of high school with some propensity to want to work in a trades field if they’ve been given some exposure. So that’s the reason I go back to the specialized teaching. I think we need to have that component of the job in place in order to take full advantage of any sort of trades support that’s going to be introduced by the department.
Teachers’ housing is an issue everybody talks about. That’s also an issue in my riding. The interesting thing I found was that, doing a rough calculation of the Infrastructure Acquisition Plan, it shows that from the time the budgets were put into place, there’s an increase of about $35 million. I don’t know why that occurs, but I know that the standard reason is that they come into the initial budgets with class D estimates, so I guess we have to do something about tightening up that process. I believe that is on the way, but it’s very glaring with this budget, that there are huge increases in all of the capital acquisition. Like I said, $35 million — that’s a substantial chunk of money to be missed, I guess, in the original estimates, so that would be something that I wish the department would review closely and check out the capital, or capital investment, or the Infrastructure Acquisition Plan, to ensure that in future the estimates — or anything that’s happened this year — are as accurate as possible.
Aside from that, that’s what I have for my address to your opening comments.