Thank you, Mr. Chair. I, too, hope one day we will have some discussions on Highway No. 9.
---Laughter
Hearing the Minister and just listening to my two colleagues, up in the region where the Mackenzie Valley winter road is still active and we still have our ice winter paving program there, we’d like to look at the infrastructure, but also to do with the O and M on the Mackenzie Valley winter road is the bridging. One of the major bottlenecks to continue our work is the Bear River Bridge. Just hearing some of the good news, I’m hopefully crossing my fingers on the federal infrastructure budget. Hopefully we can look to the government to see if they can look at Corridors III work and upgrade and move the project of the Bear River Bridge up so it can be an enhancement to the economic potential in the Sahtu region. I would greatly appreciate that.
On the other hand, I was hoping that through this O and M budget we would start seeing some indication from the government that the Sahtu would start moving into a stand-alone region on its own. There is some indication that we are moving in that direction with the decentralization. For example, the Department of Transportation started making a discussion paper on moving some of the responsibilities into the Sahtu, especially during our winter road seasonal operation. Even the airports are operated from outside the Sahtu. The government needs to start looking at the Sahtu becoming its own stand-alone region with the region making decisions on the work that needs to happen.
Mr. Chair, the budget does speak to the junior kindergarten initiatives that are going to come into our communities. As I stated earlier, the reports on how well we are doing in our small communities doesn’t look very good. Any type of help we can give would be greatly appreciated. We would certainly welcome that. For some time now, the education standards and qualities have somehow been in a position of always catching up to the other schools, especially the smaller communities. We don’t quite have all the resources that we would like to see. We always compare ourselves to the larger centres and it’s disheartening to see that
some of the other schools have some pretty good facilities and programs and services while some of the smaller communities, the teachers, the parents have to do some fundraising to get additional resources in their communities.
More importantly, now we’re starting to see that the government is focusing on the junior kindergarten for the younger kids so we can bring up the standards and the quality of education in giving our students a good foundation to kick-start their educational career.
I want to say to this government that it looks like some of these initiatives that we talked about as small communities are going to happen within this budget. I also wanted to say that the initiative to put into the small communities housing programs, and I know that we desperately need them, not only for the people that we want to attract to our region but even for our own people in our communities who are looking for homes to build their life in that community and have an opportunity to get a good job. As I’ve stated many times, there are only so many jobs that a small community can handle and there’s a cap on those jobs and a lot of people are looking for employment either with industry, government or the private sector. To attract our people back to our communities, we need to have some good support mechanisms in our communities.
More importantly, once our students leave our high schools and our communities, we’ve got to have some sort of tracking system to see how they’re doing. I hope the government is going to be doing that. Now education is so critical for an individual to have success in the bush or have success in the working economy, we need to have programs that are flexible in our community that can meet their needs.
So, these are my comments for the Minister for the budget.