Thank you, Mr.
Chair. I have a
number of comments, some of which may have been stated already. But I will restate them, as they are important to me.
First off, I was a little surprised that there’s been an addition of seven positions to the total number of positions for the department. That surprised me a bit. I am very pleased to see the additional funding for the arts. I think it’s long overdue, and I look forward to the advancement of arts in the Territories and arts programs in general. I think it’s an excellent investment.
I was also pleased that the department responded to the committee’s concern in regard to the loss of the wage subsidy program for apprenticeships. I think it’s a bit of a saw-off in the middle — that we’re going to maintain the wage subsidy for small businesses, and particularly municipalities and some of the other small organizations that use apprentices a lot. The fact that it was originally scheduled to be totally deleted, to me, was
definitely not a positive, and I didn’t see how that was going to assist us in training people for the jobs that we need in the North now and in the future. I’m very glad to see that that was reinstated, at least partially.
The statement by the Minister in his opening remarks that we are decreasing the pupil/teacher ratio by 0.5 in this next 2008–2009 year to provide students with trades and technical opportunities…. I’m unsure how reducing the pupil/teacher ratio is going to assist schools in small communities. I would think that there are certainly some that don’t have high school level grades, so I really don’t understand how trades and technical programming in those schools is going to be assisted. Certainly the other portion in communities that do have high school level, but have a very small enrolment…. I’m not sure how reducing the PTR is going to enable them to take advantage of this particular opportunity.
The other thing that I wondered about with this reduction in PTR is whether or not there’s going to be any monitoring by the department to determine if the education authorities are using the extra teachers for trades. It’s entirely possible that they will take the reduction in the PTR and use it for staffing of other programs. I’m wondering whether or not there’s a monitoring program, or at least some method of monitoring how the authorities are using their extra funding?
In reading the remarks and seeing that we’re spending $70 million on income security programs, it kind of blows me away. I am also very surprised that we’re spending an additional $6 million from last year on Income Security, and we’re adding five positions for those programs. So I do have some questions for the Minister when we come to that. It seems like we’re throwing an awful lot of money into these programs, and I wonder if it’s what we should be doing.
In general, the budget…. In the opening remarks it indicates that this budget is an increase of 3 per cent from last year’s budget. It concerns me that there are few reductions in this particular budget. It concerns me also that we’re spending a lot of money on new initiatives when we can’t meet the reduction targets that were set out. I have some questions in regard to initiatives when we get to that point.
Lastly, I’d like to talk a bit about daycares. I agree with the committee report that we need more daycare spaces. I think the department needs to be creative, as is suggested in the committee report, in terms of looking at every building that is being built, or every government-owned building that exists in a community and trying to incorporate, if necessary or if possible, daycares into some of the government spaces that exist. It’s not feasible in every community, but certainly I would guess that we
have buildings that are not 100 per cent utilized, where we could probably offer some daycare space to an organization in a community.
I want to reiterate — I think it’s already been mentioned — but daycares need to have some sort of stable funding, some sort of knowledge of what their funding is going to be on more than a day-to-day basis. Currently, daycares are funded for children who happen to be there; if the child is sick and doesn’t come, they don’t get the funding. It creates a very volatile funding situation for them, and I think the Minister and the department need to seriously consider some sort of long-term, stable funding for daycares, similar to perhaps what the education authorities do. Base the funding for daycares on their last year’s enrolment, or something similar. That’s all I have at this point, Mr. Chair. I will have questions when we get to the appropriate sections. Thank you.