Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the motion here, and appreciate my colleague bringing this forward. I would like to start by just noting that there has been an incredible amount of new research in the area of early childhood development that jurisdictions are drawing upon, and we’re starting to realize that and it’s quite an opportunity. I’d like to go over just a little bit of that here today.
Brain development occurs during the first few years of life. It really starts during the prenatal period and happens, really, the physical development, during the first three years, and then the full development, in terms of its capacity, during those first three years and a little bit beyond. The unfortunate part is if that development doesn’t happen during that stage, it becomes much more challenging to get that development done later, and certainly more expensive, in terms of the government programs and so on.
However, if children do develop in a vigorous and healthy way, their brains and their bodies, they are at an incredible level of lifetime resilience and learning capacity. Development of pathways – and that’s what this seems to depend on, the research is showing – is that there are pathways that develop in the brain with proper early childhood development and a healthy family approach. With that development, these pathways, first of all, require a caring relationship with a consistent care provider, as has been noted. Typically, these are the parents. Interactions with parents in a healthy way helps the child deal with stress it encounters – and it’s natural to encounter stress on a regular basis – and this contributes to building resiliency. Without these trusting and caring relationships, however, when a child does encounter stress, the stress does not get resolved and the impacts of that stress build and become what the professionals call toxic forms of stress, and those inhibit the development of pathways in the brain itself and the resilience that that brings.
It’s also been found that language development, for example, really it peaks within the first year of life and declines rapidly thereafter, the capacity for learning languages. That capacity is established during this early stage. That’s so important to know about. The research also shows that genetics play a role. With these healthy and caring relationships from consistent care providers, genes that are part of our makeup get expressed and activated and
that hugely enhances our capacity as a human being throughout the rest of the child’s life. Again, the opposite is without those caring relationships and proper early childhood development support, the probability of that genetic expression goes down. We want to encourage that for lifelong benefits.
I mentioned language, and that’s an important one for the Northwest Territories where we have 11 official languages and we want to ensure the health of our languages over time.
I’d also like to note that the brain is considered plastic. That is, it does have a lot of ability to recover from stress and so on, and with effort, new wiring, these new pathways can be established, but getting it right the first time is optimal for government. If we wait until pre-kindergarten, for example, to intervene in a child’s development, we are starting too late. People often assume that a child is a sponge or an empty vessel up to a certain development point. In fact, what happens very early in the foundation is that establishing this foundation though healthy pathways and development is the key to everything that follows.
I also want to note that brain development, based on the research, will, in fact, affect both learning, such as the acquisition of skills, ability to concentrate and adapt, and health. That’s from cardiovascular health to stress susceptibility for the rest of the child’s life. Again, all this is by way of saying we have a huge and exciting opportunity here to do some good work.
I think my colleague and others have mentioned where jurisdictions have focused in on this and are focusing today, they have found a huge impact, a positive impact on positive economic development, something that this House regularly talks about. We know that our social costs, two-thirds of our budget, are high and rising, and we, rather unfortunately, lead the country in many of our social statistics. It has been demonstrated, again, investments in early childhood development is the best single thing we can do to address those things, and this is including things like our educational achievements, corrections, and of course, physical and mental health.
All of this work depends, of course, as we’ve heard, on good family relationships. The child, first and foremost, is relying on its parents, and so we want good and healthy relationships there. We know that coming out of residential school and so on, there’s still a lot of healing to be done in the North. I’m pleased to say that early childhood development can help break that cycle and help the children. It is also being found in studies in Harlem, New York, for example, where this is happening, that in fact it can also have great benefits to the parents through their learning about early childhood development and how to have healthy relationships with their
very small children. There are huge opportunities on all fronts there.
It’s not surprising that other adults, the extended family, the friends of the family and ultimately as a community itself, community relationships and non-government organizations all provide critical roles, and along with those, of course, is government. That is what we are on about today. We would like to see government stepping up to the plate in a very knowledgeable way and working with experts in the field with the appropriate leads at the appropriate time, because this is a complex issue that extends right through from early childhood. We have been falling short on the earliest years, but it is a transitory thing that develops throughout the early life of a child through school. All aspects are important but the foundation is laid down in those early years, and we want to see that recognized and we want to begin programs being put in place and funded again in a coordinated and sophisticated way right this fiscal year.
We have been talking about this obviously for years now. I will leave it at that.
Again, I appreciate all of the notes from my colleagues today and they’re speaking out on this. I look forward to good work with the Ministers of Education and Health to forward this work that we are calling for today. Mahsi.