Madam Chair, I would like to thank the Minister for bringing forward the amendments and obviously the department for all their hard work on this endeavour. I also would like to thank the standing committee, who had an opportunity to come to Hay River. I know they took extra special effort to make sure they got to Hay River and I appreciate that. I think the students in Hay River appreciated giving them their two cents as well as the general public.

Most of my colleagues expressed some of the issues and concerns that came out of what I saw in Hay River, was that the changes and the amendments towards bullying is just the beginning, that bullying is not just in the schools for students and general public, bullying is throughout the general public and out there. These are the beginning steps. I think we had support. Definitely when they came to Hay River they had support, but they indicated that this is just the beginning. These students are seeing bullying out in the community as well as the general public sees bullying out in the general community, so they wanted to see it go to another level somewhere down the road.

The other area was stress and we had a lot of educators that were in Hay River at the general meeting. They had indicated that, yes, this was something that they knew needed to be implemented, but the difficulty is how it was going to be implemented. There are no additional dollars currently being implemented for it and they’re under the gun. The educators, especially that were giving feedback in Hay River, said we’re stressed to the limits of our capacity now for energy, for finances, so they were wondering who is going to implement all of these regulations and how the anti-bullying is going to be implemented in the schools.

I know that Diamond Jenness spoke of their system that was in place right now. They indicated that they have a procedure, they have a process, but if these amendments were implemented, what impact did that have on what they were going to have to do in the future. I mean, that’s just some feedback that I see in Hay River. I thought I’d pass on the words, and like I said, some of the former Members that have spoken, especially some of the committee members who are up to speed on other regions, but I think a lot of the same issues were expressed. Again, I’d like to thank them for coming to the committee, because I think they did give lots of feedback and interaction with the community.