Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am going to support this motion. I fully support the concept behind universal, affordable daycare. Mr. Bromley spoke to many of the positives that have come from universal, affordable daycare in other jurisdictions, and the research, in my mind, proves the value of an early childhood daycare program. Just reading from the whereases, it decreases poverty, it increases after-tax income, decreases the child poverty rate, it builds a better-quality labour force, it increases the number of women in the workplace. All those things are things that would benefit us in the NWT, and we know that the need is great for the benefits that I’ve just quoted. We also know the need is great for daycare spaces. We have definitely not enough in Yellowknife. There are very few of our other communities who have daycares to begin with, never mind enough spaces when they do have one.

Members have often spoken about early childhood development, and we’re in the process of revising the Early Childhood Development Framework. We have put quite a bit of focus on early childhood and on our children from zero to five. It’s really important, in my mind, that we have trained educators working with our children, particularly from zero to three, but from zero to five as well. It’s been proven that if you put the money and the effort and the good quality child development in children from zero to three, it pays huge dividends later on in life, particularly in school, but also in their life as they grow up to be adults.

Quebec’s experiment has been proven to be successful. They’ve got a few difficulties and they’re not insurmountable, but it is an extremely successful program. And I want to say that it costs a lot of money. I think Quebec’s cost is something like $2.2 billion on an annual basis. Ours wouldn’t be anywhere near there, I’m sure. We are a much smaller population. But I do want to say that the Quebec experiment proves that for every dollar that they spend, they get back a dollar and five, so it’s a money-making operation.

If we don’t go study this and implement this particular program, we could continue on with what we’re doing, and we are putting some money into early childhood development programs, but I feel that they are not necessarily coordinated. We have two departments working on it and they are working together. I give them credit for that. But I don’t think we have an across-the-board consideration and focus on early childhood development that early

affordable daycare would give us. Some of the programs that do have daycare are of perhaps an unknown quality. We do have licenced daycare but we also have home daycares and, yes, they’re regulated but are they going to have the trained people looking after our children from zero to five that we want and that we need?

Mr. Bromley has spoken to the issue of our need for workers, and I totally agree. We are going to need, particularly in areas where development is going to be occurring, and the Sahtu is one area for sure where we’re going to be needing more workers. This program will put more females into the workforce, more mothers into the workforce, and it will provide us with more skilled workers. We want to keep that work in the North. At the moment, we have to go out to get many of our skilled workers. This kind of a program will free up people who can work and we will be able to keep that work and those dollars in the North.

We know that the Quebec model works and we know that we are a different jurisdiction. We’re much smaller, as Mr. Dolynny said. We have a different culture here. Therefore, the need for a study. We cannot take the model of Quebec or the model of Scandinavia and implement it right here. We need to look at what will work here. I know it will work. It’s just how we’re going to implement it.

One last thing I want to mention, I don’t think anyone has mentioned this before, but one of the things that we are constantly hearing is that our population in the NWT is decreasing. One of the benefits of this program in Quebec is that their birthrate has increased. The Finance Minister is always looking for more revenue. That’s one way we can get it and an extra $25,000 from the feds for every new child that we birth.

So in closing, I support the motion. I think it’s time for us to look at this, I know the need is there, we have a successful model to work from. We need to just, as you would say, get er’ done. Thank you.