Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Minister and staff for coming before us.

Madam Chair, the points that I want to make are the pace at which we’re educating our children in our small communities. Our communities have a high number of young people and I was in somewhat of shock and dismay when the Alberta test results came out and they showed the education. It gave me a snapshot picture of the education in our smaller communities and in our education system, the department. We are funding our schools, yet we are not as up to par as we think we are.

In our schools I think there’s got to be a definite move from how we do business. We have talked about this issue of social passing for a long, long time. This indicates that it’s definitely not our way of doing business. We’ve got to have something more that tells these students what grade they’re in, that’s the exact grade they’re in. We have a student who’s in Grade 4 or Grade 6 that testing tells us they are at least two grades behind. That, to me, is totally unacceptable within our education system. If something radically needs to happen, then we need to make it happen.

I hope the Minister with his new initiatives that he talked about, that we’re going to see that change. I am not sure if it’s going to take two years or three years. That’s not going to do anything for our students who are graduating this year; they’re in Grade 12. Everybody is planning a graduation ceremony. How many students are going to make it through a post-secondary entrance or how many are going to go back to Aurora College and say I have to upgrade? Is there any tracking within the high school system that says in the Sahtu of the last five years, for example, X-amount of students graduated? How many are in post-secondary

institutions? How many are living in communities? How many are working? There are a few exceptional students, despite termination of encouragement from families, who make it on their own. Some of these students even go into upgrading for a year. They go to Edmonton. My nephew went to Hay River to upgrade, working as a student, but upgrading in Hay River. There’s a few of them that make it because they really want to.

We’ve been hearing this for the last four or five years. I’m looking forward to the Minister’s initiatives that we all talked about in closing the gap between our small communities and the larger centres such as Yellowknife and Hay River. The gap is too wide and that’s unacceptable. If you want to see the quality of education, look at our education system in Yellowknife, Hay River, Inuvik and our smaller communities. There is no equality. Look at the grades that they’re testing at. There is no equality. So to say that all students are going to get equal programs, equality in our schools, it’s not there and we’re not doing any justice to the parents or the communities.

So that social program initiative has to go. We have to do something else to replace it. If it’s going to cost money, then that’s what we have to do. Why suffer because it’s going to cost us X amount of millions? Our students are going to be suffering. So that’s a big one on my plate for education.

I like what the Minister did. He went around the region, he talked to the people and he heard in the last Assembly on the initiative of the Aboriginal Achievement and he’s moving that forward, and he started to do some work on the early childhood, and that’s a good thing.

I wanted to talk about the Adult Education Program that we have with Aurora College. I know the federal government has given Aurora College a lot of money under the Literacy Program. I look forward to seeing some future plans as to how these dollars will be rolling out into the communities to improve the literacy of the parents, the people, the kids through Aurora College’s plans.

Madam Chair, when we saw the impacts of development in our region, the Sahtu, the income support recipients going down because of the oil and gas company – Husky Energy came in and did some work in that area – and the level of income support recipients has gone down quite a lot in dollars. So it tells you that if you have income, income support from the oil companies and mining companies and people want to work. We need to help them get away from their dependency on government. Not only the short term and after awhile we need their work, because the season slows, they get back. I wouldn’t mind seeing some results as to the Sahtu prior to the oil companies coming in and after the oil companies come in. I’d like to see that graphed. I’m going to ask for that.

I want to show that we want to work in the Sahtu, but it’s very hard sometimes to break from that dependency. We’ve got them to a point where they expect that it’s almost like their right. You’re going to feed me; you’re going to house me; you’re going to clothe me. We’ve got them to a point where their thinking is very lazy. That’s too bad. Even the little kids now in our schools go to government with their hand out. We’ve done some things that don’t help our people. I want to ask this Minister some of these questions later on.

Overall, he’s got a big department. I haven’t even talked about culture. However, I just wanted to say that he’s got a big budget and some big issues, but more importantly is education. I have a personal stake in this. My little boy is in Grade 5 in Tulita and it’s not the same as a Grade 5 here in Yellowknife. That really ticks me off and I need to know that we need to make some changes. So I’m just showing a little bit of my frustration and my compassion for it. I’ll have more questions later on.