Thank you, Madam Chair. Just some general comments. I think we can all agree that a school is an essential institution to a community and I mean we’ve had a history of the institutions establishing themselves in communities and then we have children brought into the schools and there’s a need for parents to live in close quarters to their children. So whenever you have a school it, of course, becomes an essential institution of the community. So there’s always a support system in place to ensure that the school is successful and also that it produces successful members of society. I think that’s the goal that we all strive for.
In the Dec Cho constituency, there are schools in the larger communities, but at the same time smaller communities always aspire and want to ensure that there’s an established institution so that parents have the opportunity to be close to the children and ensure that we have the greatest impact of molding these future citizens of society in their primary years. So it’s really integral that we have that opportunity as parents to ensure that we embellish the right virtues and principles to kids that we raise as our children.
I wanted to point out, too, that in terms of the languages, I’m very conscious and try to speak my language whenever I’m given the opportunity and we’re also challenged just by the demography in terms of what age you’re at, in terms of how often our language is used. So I understand there are challenges in ensure that our languages are retained. There are always ways to try to maybe improve it in terms of strategies. I know there have been efforts to revitalize the state of the languages. Of course, language and culture are relative to each other, so they go hand in hand.
One of the big things that I always really strongly believed in is training and training opportunities. We have some very large projects in terms of development projects coming down the rank for the Northwest Territories at some point and I think we need to ensure that we prepare our workforce, our labour force. There is a very vital need at local communities that we have people that get access to trades, so that we have an abundance, or at least so the local community people that could safely provide services to furnaces, that kind of stuff; electrical wiring in our local communities. At the same time, we have people who are trained to be certified plumbers as well. There’s a real recognized need at the local level that we have people who can provide those services and are from the community and trained locally. They’re certified in the end and, at the same time, they contribute to the overall functioning of society.
On those points, I just wanted to at least raise those points, given the opportunity, too, if I could ask a question.