Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a number of comments. In general I echo many of Mr. Bromley’s comments. I think that there’s an opportunity in all the budgets that we’re seeing and all the budgets of each department that we’re going to go through. There’s been an opportunity for them to do some things differently and I don’t see that either of the departments that we’ve looked at so far have taken up that challenge and have looked at what they’re doing and looked at doing it differently to try and encompass some of the main philosophies that Members on this side of the House have been talking about for a long time.
In terms of early childhood development, I also am pleased to see that there is a review of the Framework for Action, which apparently is in the works right now and I look forward to seeing that review. I’m a firm believer in evaluating programs once we’ve set them up and I don’t think this government does that nearly often enough.
I do have fairly major concerns with the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative. I support the intent of the initiative but I’m not sure that we’re putting the money in the right place to effect what we need to do to increase Aboriginal student success. I think, if I read this correctly and from what I remember of the business plans, what we’re intending to do this year is a literacy initiative. We’re going to hire a literacy coordinator and put libraries in five additional communities. I’m not seeing how that is going to increase Aboriginal student achievement success. I’m going to have some questions for the Minister when we get to that part of the budget.
In terms of the funding for the arts, I too am extremely supportive of the amount of money that this government has put in over the years. It has been increasing and that’s a good thing. I hope that we continue to increase support for the arts as we go forward.
The adult and post-secondary education section talks about an expanded delivery of community-based Teacher Education Program in the South Slave. I also support the local teacher education programs in our various regions but I do wonder whether or not the department has done an evaluation of the current community-based teacher education programs that are in operation. Have they proved to be successful? On what basis are we expanding the program into the South Slave? Is there a demonstrated need? Was the department approached to put it in or is this a decision that the department made and on what basis did they make that decision? I’m looking for an evaluation of what we’re doing now and was there a demonstrated need to go into the South Slave with this program.
With regard to the apprenticeship and employment development, we’re implementing an NWT Labour Force Development Framework and I think coordination of our apprenticeship and employment development programs is good and it sounds as though that’s what this framework does. I haven’t seen it, but I would hope that it would coordinate what we’re doing in this area.
I’m quite concerned about what the Minister is saying here under income security. We’re going to review the income security delivery model in 2011-2012. It probably does need to be reviewed but I wonder if the department is reviewing it in isolation or if it is going to review its income security model in light of what goes on in other departments. I’m specifically concerned that there’s no mention here of reviewing it in light of an Anti-Poverty Strategy or an anti-poverty framework. The anti-poverty work is ongoing and it does involve the Department of Education, Culture and Employment. I know that. So I really hope that if we’re going to review our income security delivery, that we will do it with the view to assisting those who are living in poverty, because certainly now income security does not make it easy for people to either get the funds, to apply for the funds, it impacts on how they can or cannot get their housing. There are so many things where there are barriers which are put up knowingly or unknowingly, but people run across roadblocks at every turn when they are trying to deal with income security and housing particularly.
The statement that we’re adding almost one and three-quarter million dollars to the costs for income security is quite concerning, $1.4 million to increase regional budgets for income assistance and then another $350,000 to ensure the retention of positions, so I’m presuming that’s staffing, because we have a rising income assistance caseload. That’s concerning. We should be wanting to see our income security caseload going down. We should be getting people off income security and I hope that with this review we’ll see why people are on income security and we will be able to determine how we can get them off it. That should be the
ultimate goal. We should have a Territory where nobody needs income security.
I’ll have some specific questions on certain programs when we come to that portion of the budget, Mr. Chair, but that’s all I think I’ll say at this point. Thank you.