Thank you, Mr. Speaker. October 18th to the 26th is designated Teen Driver Safety

Week across Canada, and it’s a great time to raise awareness and talk about the reticence that teen drivers might have and hopefully they can improve their skills and awareness and hopefully prevent injury. More importantly, this awareness talks about some of the extra risk-taking behaviour of some of our teens, and hopefully deal with some of the lack of experience they may have as drivers.

For the record, our Graduated Drivers Licence Program in the NWT, administered by the Department of Transportation, is a great program and I believe a lot of these are encompassed within that program. But we should never go too far. We should always look outside the box and look for opportunities for our young people to not only become better drivers but to actually get drivers’ licences themselves.

So keeping this theme in mind, in recent travels to the Sahtu I was able to speak to a number of business community leaders and business leaders, and talked about some of the opportunities our teens, our young people, are having to achieve. One of the comments that came up time and time again is that our teens do not have drivers’ licences. Once they graduate, it’s very difficult for them to find work, because a lot of them show up for jobs without a driver’s licence and they’re turned away. So we started talking about some solutions here, amongst some of these business leaders as well as community leaders, and I talked to some of my colleagues all over the Mackenzie Delta and all the way down to the South Slave. One opportunity

showed itself here, and that opportunity would obviously involve the Department of ECE and the Department of Transportation. That is talking about the sponsored driver education training and licensing that we can put in the schools.

These young people are our future and we keep talking about economic opportunities that await them and we talk about all the mineral development infrastructure and everything that we’re doing, but these jobs require, a lot of times, prerequisites such as a driver’s licence. I know many of you out there are thinking well, geez, Daryl, what about the liabilities, the costs, administration. I agree; these are things we need to iron out. But we need to invest in our future; we need to invest in our youth. We have to give them purpose and we have to provide these ladders of opportunity.

Need I remind our Members here, their 17th Assembly Caucus priority is Believing in People and Building on the Strength of Northerners. Teen driver training education and licensing in schools is a very simple step that will have huge benefits. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.