Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’ll make my comments really brief here. I do believe this is one of the more important budgets. It’s the second largest and it represents over 20 percent of our budget. Like my colleagues, I am concerned that we have only seen a 1 percent increase in this budget. The importance of it is also in the fact that I think education, being the larger component of it, is important in the territory. It’s the investment in the future. And that’s at several different levels, whether it’s at early childhood, K to 12 and post-secondary and the apprenticeships. I think we should look at trying to commit more dollars to this department whenever possible, and I know there’s always more things we could be doing, but also looking at some of the reviews and some of the suggestions we’ve done through business plans to do some things smarter.

I know on the regional level we’ve looked for the department to give us the ability for a little bit more

flexibility and how some of the budgets are handed out, where the money is set into columns and not flexible in certain areas, which our local education authorities have been trying to break down those columns so that they can use their monies more efficiently. That’s more on the local level.

One of the other areas of concern that I have is positioning and, obviously, like most departments in the GNWT, there are a great deal of positions that are in headquarters. This department, 71 percent represents headquartered positions. Obviously, there are a lot of positions that are through the local authorities but in the regional authorities but, still, headquarters has the bulk of the money that’s here. My concerns are the fact that those numbers should be… The money should be out in the regions where the kids and students are being educated.

I mentioned early childhood development. I think it’s an area that we need to work more on. Some of the difficulties with the graduation levels are because we lose some of these children really early in the system and they fall behind, and by the time they get to the graduation point they’re so far behind they’ve been discouraged and have dropped out. I think we need to commit more dollars to early childhood development.

As I mentioned, I’d like to see, along with that early childhood development, obviously, the graduation levels go up. Like my colleagues have indicated, these numbers are very low and they are a vital part of an indicator of how successful this department is doing.

Those are my opening comments. I’ll have more questions and comments as we get into detail. Thank you.