Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will be voting in favour of this motion.

As I indicated today in my Member’s statement and I’ve indicated in the House before, along with all my colleagues here all the way from the north all the way to the south, this is an issue, this funding is an issue.

We continue to get e-mail after e-mail from our district education authorities, but there are more and more questions about how this will roll out, how junior kindergarten will be funded, how it will affect the Aboriginal Head Start program. In the community of Hay River, how will it affect the playschool program? How will it affect everything and how will it be funded?

The Minister keeps giving out information and then says surpluses are not up for grabs, the departments just need to find money within, but yet presents the information, a projection of surpluses. So, I mean, the information of a surplus being put out to the public is saying this is what they can use if they want to. But for the projection, why wouldn’t the department use an actual amount of the surplus? Then the surplus would be… You know, I’m getting information from my authority the fact that the surplus is actually not there in a cash amount. Some of those funds are being used to back up pensions, to back up other operations and being spent towards the end of the year. They’re doing a projection based on no communication with the authority, or very little.

When my authority had a discussion with the Department of Education, the Department of Education couldn’t justify where they came up with the number for their surplus. They just said this is the number we’ve come up with, but they couldn’t actually show the figures that figured out in comparisons. So the two of them couldn’t sit down and compare the numbers of how those surpluses are there.

There are so many facets of this junior kindergarten funding that is out there. We’ve heard the issues with Yellowknife, the funds being taken from there. The $7 million that’s coming out of operations to fund junior kindergarten and then it’s going to be put back into place. Now I’m learning that Yellowknife is going to get funding for 16 to 1, but then Hay River or Yellowknife or Fort Smith, some of the regional centres will be affected because our PTR is an average of the region, so that’s going to hurt us in the regional centres as well.

There are so many facets of this and so many difficulties that I ask all the Members on the other side from Cabinet, that this is not just an issue from one MLA or two MLAs, this is all of us here complaining that junior kindergarten needs to be rolled out a little bit differently. We need to pull this back, figure out how we’re going to fund it and go from there. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.