Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to stand up and use this occasion to revisit the issue of junior kindergarten. Last week the Minister made a statement, and that was his second statement in this particular House where he talked about junior kindergarten will be available for four-year-olds starting in the new year, and of course, it will be rolled out over three years throughout the various communities.

Let me first get the biggest issue out of the way. I don’t know anybody who is against junior kindergarten. There is nobody on this side of the House against junior kindergarten, and sometimes in our questions and answers it is described as over here we are against junior kindergarten when you question his policy methodology. I can frankly say, I haven’t spoken to everybody in the Northwest Territories and I am not sure that is even feasible, in the sense of my lifetime, by going door to door knocking on every door and saying, do you support junior kindergarten. However, I do feel comfortable by saying, and I certainly feel very strong in saying that I could say everybody, in an overwhelming majority, would support the development of the Junior Kindergarten Program.

The one issue before us, and continues to be before us, articulated clearly by the school boards, being raised by Members, being raised by the public, is the funding model. That is only the issue.

The Minister of Education has decided, and certainly designed, that they will now work with producing 14 years of schooling on 13 years of budgeting, and to be clear for the public that don’t follow that, that is also when we include kindergarten as the 13th year.

Now they are asking for a 14th year, so you have your normal one to 12 plus kindergarten and junior kindergarten. It is like saying we are going to re-profile 7 percent of your funding. Let’s think about that, 7 percent of your funding. Let’s put it this way. If we had asked the Department of Education to re-profile their $305.6 million budget and we took and re-profiled 7 percent of their funding, that would almost be $22 million. I could only imagine them kicking and screaming and saying, it isn’t fair, we couldn’t run programs, we’d have to lay people off. I could imagine. I don’t know where we’d start and certainly finish on what they would say. The point being, and the issue before MLAs, before the public, before the school board is the funding model.

I’m going to close by saying if the children, if the students, if families really mattered that much, then ask us for the money, we’ll find a way. Thank you very much.