Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to first begin by saying thank you to the Member for Mackenzie Delta, who has brought forward some of his concerns. I appreciate him supporting this motion by seconding it. It’s an honour to have a community Member like him working together because we certainly see the issue as a whole in the sense that we all want good education programs for our youth. There’s no doubt in my mind that every Member here supports educational opportunities for our young people.

We heard clearly from the chair of the Aboriginal Head Start program that she is calling for a pause. Changes the Minister is directing are destabilizing Aboriginal Head Start programs.

I’ve been contacted by one community that has Aboriginal Head Start and they’re concerned about the effects that it’s going to change. They view this as federal money at risk. Not territorial money, federal money is at risk. They told me, in their words, how will the federal government keep funding a program that doesn’t have any kids?

Mrs. Erasmus had said, in her words, our eight communities it has our program in jeopardy. It just doesn’t get clearer than that.

It’s time to support the communities by giving them the tools they want. Every Member here supports that. All the Minister of Education has to do is ask. MLA Bromley had made this reference earlier, which was the fact that we’re very generous when it comes to education and health. Those are two program departments that we will give where we can and we’ll go the extra mile.

All Members want this initiative to proceed, but not in the manner it’s been designed. Time and time again I keep hearing the word “discussions,” these are the discussions we need to have. Frankly, you would think that if the department was steamrolling

this initiative, they would have had these answers already.

Every time we stand up, we should be asking a question that is easy to answer. But no, it’s like they’re implementing a program that has been ill-advised, ill-designed, well-intended, but not thought out.

I know a lot of good people that are working on this program. I like the concept of this program. I think the work that they’re doing is amazing. But when it comes to the financial implementation of this program, you’re now having community against community. You’re going to have program against program. You’re going to have junior kindergarten in a small community like Fort Providence, my colleague Mr. Nadli represents, fighting the Aboriginal Head Start program for bodies. It just doesn’t make sense.

Mrs. Erasmus wants to talk, but the Minister isn’t answering the call. These types of things need to be sought, discussed and solved before implementation. It’s kind of like the old joke: shoot first and ask questions later. They’re implementing it and figuring it out after they’ve implemented it.

Just a minute ago, to MLA Bisaro, the Minister said the impact would be about 2 percent, but on page 9 on his fact sheets it says it would be somewhere between 0.4 and 1 percent. So that’s 0.4 to 1 percent. The Minister is changing the numbers on the fly. That alone should remind every single one of us that a lot of detail still must be thought out.

I could probably go at length and I would probably enjoy every minute of it, but the fact is what I want to hear from the Minister is they will stop taking funding away from school boards, they will fund this properly from the start. Everyone wants this to happen. We just want it to happen in collaboration between Aboriginal Head Start programs and Junior Kindergarten programs in small communities. We want large communities supported, and by golly, every single one of us wants to get behind this. We just want it done correctly from the start.

I will be calling for a recorded vote, so I’ll get that out of the way now. Frankly, I’m going to pause here because I know my colleagues have a lot more to add to this discussion. Thank you very much.