Thank you, Mr. Chair. We’ve been in touch with the Minister on this. We’ve had discussions; we’ve had back and forths. During the business plans the Minister gave us early indication that he was considering dropping this and he proposed three conditions under which he would reconsider it. We’ve been in touch with Skills Canada and I’m happy to report that those conditions are fully met. The first one that the Minister required was an expansion across the Northwest Territories, the second a focus on aboriginal youth and the third a focus on young women of the Skills Canada programs.
Clearly, Mr. Speaker, we provided the Minister with evidence that, in fact, the majority of their youth are aboriginal. They are a bit challenged in the secondary educational level category and they have proposed a solution to that. They’ve noted that aboriginal youth are disproportionately low among high school youth and the best way to change this is with more community programs like Skills Club, which is a program that they support. They are now trying to implement more of those to address that, noting that they are somewhat limited by the resources that are available.
As for targeting young women, the Skills Canada hosts an annual territorial Young Women’s Conference, which they’ve done for the last eight years. They also hold a similar conference for boys. They found that holding them separate is actually more effective. They have developed a new Regional Youth Conference in the Sahtu, speaking to their expansion of programs within their limited resources across the Northwest Territories. The Sahtu program is specifically intended to involve both young men and young women, but dealing with them in separate workshops.
Finally, the increase for aboriginal youth, there is a major desire to increase the access of these programs to aboriginal youth. To that end, they are developing the community Skills Clubs and they are recognizing the female-only programming is important and necessary, but they also know that it should be balanced with similar opportunities for males as they do with all their youth conferences.
Skills Canada is a program of two people but they have expanded it under contract to three people last year, this current year. That third person has been a major help in getting this expansion on the ground to other parts of the Northwest Territories. That third person, if they do not get the support, will, of course, disappear and that program will be contracted significantly.
This is a fairly straightforward, not a large ticket item, but some significant dollars here. There is strong support for getting these dollars reinstated here. The Minister laid out some conditions.
Obviously, Skills Canada is working hard to meet those and has the committee’s support. On that basis, I’ll be happy to leave it at that, Mr. Chair. Thank you.