Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m probably the umpteenth person who has stood up in this House to talk about Junior Kindergarten, but I have to weigh in on this topic. My questions are for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.

Right from the start, who can argue with early childhood development and expanding that within our government? Where the problem lies is how this department tried to take, yet again, a cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all approach to early childhood development in the communities without taking into consideration what impacts that would have and what ripple effect that would have. In a community like Hay River where we have play school, Growing Together, Tree House, Aboriginal Head Start where age four children attend all of these programs, sure, parents are going to put their kids into an optional Junior Kindergarten Program, but we have added this. We’ve asked our educational councils to do more with less. So I don’t think you could find a parent who wouldn’t agree with the principle, but if you ask the same parents if they want to have the whole school system diluted by adding another grade, essentially, into our schools without any funding to go with it, I’m sure you would get some mixed responses.

So I would like to ask the Minister – and maybe he’s been asked this before, but let me ask again – did you consider, in the small communities where the need was the most dire where you didn’t already have long established ECE programming, did you approach the federal government and think about things like Aboriginal Head Start? Thank you.