Thank you, Madam Speaker. I have been hearing much lately about GNWT initiatives for early childhood development and early childhood education. I’m fully supportive of these initiatives. In fact, I think we should be putting more

money into improving programs and services for our children aged zero to three.

Today I want to highlight some of the implications of the government’s early childhood development initiatives. The Department of Education will, in September 2014, start junior kindergarten in 29 of our 33 communities, and that will expand to all 33 communities by September 2016 when it will start in Yellowknife. Yellowknife is one of only a few NWT communities where there are several fairly large licenced daycares, and preschool or junior kindergarten programming is available at all Yellowknife school boards. But the implementation of junior kindergarten in 2016 will impact both the daycares and the schools.

My first concern: Junior kindergarten will provide an opportunity for parents to place their four-year-old into free classes instead of the fee-charging daycares, Montessori, or school-run junior kindergarten. For daycares, which are a for-profit business, who take children from a few months to four years of age, the four-year-olds provide the greatest chance for profit. The required ratio of caregiver to children is less than that for the zero to three-year-olds, and the business can register more four-year-olds than they can babies. Junior kindergarten will draw all those four-year-olds away from the daycares and into free junior kindergarten. In order to replace those four-year-olds with younger children, the daycare will have to hire more staff, thus losing out on their profit opportunity.

It’s quite likely that at least one daycare will lose enough of their profitability that the business will have to close, and in the end all that will accomplish is a reduction in the number of available child care spaces when they’re in short supply already. Yellowknife daycares have already seen a drop in their enrolments after the schools added their junior kindergarten fee-paying programs.

A second concern: Another initiative of ECE is to require certification of early childhood educators. That’s all well and good, but better qualified instructors means higher remuneration for staff and higher costs for the business that employs them. Will the Department of Education amend the ECD funding formula to assist daycares with the extra staffing costs they will incur? Apparently not.

I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

---Unanimous consent granted