Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess, once again, our second largest department budget-wise, operations is relegated to 2 percent for the third year in a row of our capital budget, 2 percent. This despite repeated and ongoing requests of MLAs to help set the priorities, the Finance Minister mentioned, year after year, to put more capital dollars into this department to reflect our regard for education as the number one priority and capital being an important part of that.

Sissons, of course, in Yellowknife, I heard the Minister just say our approach is to focus on schools that badly need it. Well, good grief; Sissons has needed it since my first year as a politician. It has been raised every year and nothing is happening. Our kids continue to go school there. Our Commission scolaire francophone Territories du Nord-Quest turned it down. We wouldn’t take that; we wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. And who can blame them? It’s an embarrassment, and again, we’re sending our kids there. So, 2 percent of the capital budget is hardly worth spending any time on here.

The courts have said we’ve got to provide these things, and we’re going back and arguing about that, but I mean, at some level we will have to do that. Once again, it’s not reflected in the budget. I know the department’s working on this and perhaps they’ve identified a school or two, but presumably there would be a capital budget requirement for that. So again, it’s another department that will likely have more added later that we’re not hearing about.

So the ECE budget, capital budget, $5.8 million NWT-wide, not a dollar, not a single loonie to be spent on schools, school infrastructure, in Yellowknife and Hay River, 60 percent of our children.

The Aurora College we know remains. I was fortunate to join my colleagues from committee on a tour not so long ago, and I have to say, we missed it, each of us missed half the tour because we couldn’t fit in the space where the discussion was going on. Talk about sardines. Yet no mention, no discussion. Yeah, sardines. Sardines in a can, and every one of the people we saw said that, of course, and pointed out how they couldn’t turn around. I have to say, I agree that there’s very little cultural investment other than the dollars going towards the replacement of a generator at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Museum. Again, a third year in a row, a 2 percent capital budget and long-standing issues not being resolved.