I thank the Minister for that response. I think it’s essential. These dollars become essential to small communities and may not be essential. They are dollars that are nice to have. In small communities it’s nice to be able to have daycares and city of Yellowknife daycares in the regional centres for kids to go to. I just wonder if any of that support is given to those daycares, because it appears as though the money is not avaialble to small communities in a large way.
For two days I asked the Minister questions on daycare, preschool, and I kind of came away with the feeling that the department doesn’t do infrastructure, for example, for daycares, which is understandable and it’s pretty simple, they go out and get the mortgage, but can the department provide subsidies for the daycares in small communities so that they can afford to go out and get a mortgage, build a unit to house a preschool, a daycare and so on? A proper unit, not just an old trailer that belongs to the band or one corner of the community hall, but a proper buildling. So I’m going to ask the Minister if there could be some sort of a strategy in place, some sort of criteria in place, some sort of point system, if that’s what it comes down to in order to determine where dollars in this area, or dollars in daycare and preschool and so on, using community standards like the level of employment, the level of income into the communities to determine if this is used to support and get evreybody up to a certain level if we just keep everything the same based on application.
The application I’m assuming would be based on the fact that there’s people that are employed, there’s a need for child care. But my concern is more in subsidizing that. If this govenrment is spending $4 million in early childhood development, $7 million in early childhood development, whatever it is that’s targeted specifically for this, is it going to the larger communities or the smaller communities? Thank you.