Thank you, Madam Chair. Probably a lot of my comments are similar to my colleagues here. I am definitely happy to see the 3.6 percent increase in the budget. I think this is a department of great potential for this territory. Education is very important to the development of us. Obviously, the activity in Early Childhood Development is very proactive of us to be involved in that. I am definitely happy to see the Student Financial Assistance enhancements, as well as some of my colleagues have indicated that getting money back into the Inclusive Schooling would be a definite asset to us.
Some of the areas of concern in this department that I have is we’re dealing with budget, we’re dealing with budgets from, from my perspective it’s from the community of Hay River, but they’re dealing with the South Slave Divisional Board’s budget. So some of the areas of concern in that area is the flexibility of funding from the board’s perspective and from the DEA’s perspective. A lot of the funding is provided to them in columns. These are what the funds are used for and if they’re not used for that then they have to be returned. We’re having some difficulties in communities like Hay River with some of the funding not being allocated and spent when there’s dollars that are being overspent, let’s say for busing, where we spend a lot of money in busing because the community of Hay River is spread out all over the place. Other communities don’t even do busing and still get busing funding. So I think flexibility in funding, and we’ve seen some of the same issues with Health and some of the other departments
where a lot of the funds are given in columns. It would be nice to have flexibility in the funding.
My colleagues have discussed some of the official languages and the numbers. Some languages are doing really well, very strong, but some are very, very weak. I think we have to look at that and the way we fund those, and look at different ways that we can build those very weak ones and see if there’s a way to do more with the little bit of money that we’re spending there. I think there’s potential to keep some of those languages on the go, but it’s very difficult when there are very few people speaking those languages. So we have to be very creative. I challenge the department to find ways to do that.
One of the other areas that I’m happy to see the department working on is some of the education that’s going to be happening with all the development throughout the Northwest Territories. The excitement in the Sahtu area and even the potential in the Beau-Del area as far as educating people and where some of the work potential is going to be… If we ever do that Tuk to Inuvik highway, there’s going to be training requirements. Obviously, the Sahtu work, there’s all kinds of educating people and having skilled people so that we can keep Northerners working in the North.
So I think it’s a very exciting department, a very big budget. I think those are my general comments and I’ll have more specific questions as we go along. Thank you, Madam Chair.