Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a very good opportunity to comment on some of the current directions of Education, Culture and Employment at this time when we are reviewing line-by-line budget items. Perhaps I will just follow up on my Member’s statement earlier today on aboriginal language dollars being lapsed in 2007-08 and 2008-09. I know we are in the 2009-10 fiscal year. We are debating 2010-11, but my concern is that I do not wish to see this happen again for this coming fiscal year. I know that some departments strive very hard at the end of the fiscal year to spend their budgeting but, for whatever reason, our aboriginal language doesn’t have the same verve to get this money out to the communities, to the specific projects out there. By far, that would be, of course, my single greatest criticism, especially when I have projects that I have been supporting and moving forward and I get a letter saying, sorry, all the money is spent for this year. I know it is not true. That is my concern right now. I would like the department to watch out for that and even support whatever initiatives the community base as they come along, especially given the importance we have given the aboriginal languages.

Like I said, the French are very vigorous in ensuring their rights are entrenched. We do have laws that entrench our aboriginal languages. Ourselves as legislators, ourselves as a government have to do everything we can to ensure that whatever resources we dedicate to our aboriginal languages are spent and not lapsed, because once you are doing that, especially in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, that is a lot of resources that our communities, our language learners, our small

schools can use to bolster our aboriginal languages.

In this new budget, I am interested in the Minister of Finance’s statement, of course, with the return of the income support for housing back to the housing authorities. I think that is a great move. That is something people have been looking for.

But also coupled with this is something that I will be speaking about probably later there, Mr. Chairman, is that the rent scale has to be rolled back again. As government we can do that. I think the last time the rent scale was at the 90 percent level of salary and what that, in effect, means, Mr. Chairman, is that previous to the rent scale being moved up to 100 percent, people were actually paying $500 a month for their low rental units.

In fact, I’ve got a constituent that said when we roll it up to 100 percent, their rents were now $700 or $800 and they’re saying, well, why do you call it low rental housing when we’re not paying low rent. Right? And that’s something that our people are looking for, is the ability of our government… They do it in other jurisdictions. They actually have low rental housing programs, but because of the way we change things so much… There were a couple changes that happened at the same time -- I’m very aware of that -- but we don’t have low rental housing and other jurisdictions do. In fact, they create low housing districts in order to stimulate the economy there, Mr. Chair, and that’s the same kind of vision we must return to. In order to help our people, the rent has got to be low. We can’t be clawing them back and keeping them in the salary negative, which means every time they make more money, then we charge them more. There has to be a better way around it.

First things first. I applaud the government for listening to this side of the House and working hard on returning housing back over to the housing authorities. I think that’s something that our people wanted. I know that there’s much debate about it finally working. People are getting used to it now and returning it. But at the same time that’s what people have always wanted and I think we’re going in the right direction with that.

Another thing that’s picking up interest, of course, is the $400,000 with regard to the Nutritious Foods Program. I know it’s listed as a nutritious foods study in the budget. Government has written to this side of the House saying they’re going to re-profile it to establish a committee and look at other ways of distributing this money to the communities. I’m not too sure how it works in the smaller communities, but I know that our education councils have bent over backwards, found whatever money they could to help with nutritious breakfasts, annual luncheon in our smaller communities, and if there’s going to be $400,000 to assist with nutritious foods, if anything, I think that’s where it should go. It’s

increasing the value of the food they can provide to smaller communities and a lot of it is done by volunteers as well, but it’s a great thing that they’re going to re-profile it and move it towards that type of programming. But the plan is not clear of how that $400,000 is going to be re-profiled. They’re talking about, of course, creating a committee, but establishing a committee is the last thing that my constituents tell me. They say they would rather see programming and resource dollars right in the communities as opposed to striking up some kind of committee. The last thing we need is another committee. However, of course, direction has to be given about how to best distribute this money, but I think the goal is to bolster our community programs and if this is one way we can do it, I certainly support the direction government is going, but it’s still not clear. Perhaps when we come to that line item, Mr. Chair, I’ll ask more questions on it.

Other than that, just moving on about increasing money budgeted for community adult learning centres is much needed support, as well, to our communities.

Actually, while I’ve got the floor, Mr. Speaker, I better speak passionately about something I’ve been asking the Minister and our government, which was the community library in Fort Simpson. There’s still no resolution there despite how many times I’ve raised the issue and tried to move it forward. It’s not supported by government only because there’s some kind of transfer agreement that the Village of Fort Simpson uses it. But I’ve been thinking, Mr. Chair, some of the funded libraries that we do have are in the regional centres and in fact they’re entrenched in our Public Libraries Act. They’re actually in the act, like Hay River, Yellowknife. They’re actually a public library in the act so they’re funded by the Government of the Northwest Territories. If we could move towards something like that, Mr. Chair, we’d move towards establishing that Fort Simpson library as a regional library, then the resource of our government can certainly work towards establishing it. A community of that size, a region of about 4,000 people without a public library is very, very shameful. Believe it or not, there are still people that have value for books even in our Internet world, but now all we’re reduced to is just a resource centre there, Mr. Chair, with a bunch of computers. Of course, the children still use it, but a lot of the impact of having a library is gone and children used to love it when we had a good program of bringing in authors, et cetera. So it’s probably still there, but it’s just not the same impact, Mr. Chair.

So I’ll continue to raise those issues as we move through the budget deliberations. Thank you.