This is a perfect example of the government delivering an initiative that they think is good in a very wide broadcast area without the thinking and without the rationalization and the figuring out what the ripple effect is. There’s no sense in re-evaluating Junior Kindergarten in Hay River after you have gutted Aboriginal Head Start, Treehouse, Growing Together, French preschool, the Hay River Cooperative Playschool, which has trained professionals that have been in those jobs for many years. It’s an institution in our community. The community donates $50,000 a year to the Hay River Cooperative Playschool. This is volunteerism. This is an NGO. This is a place with trained workers. There’s no sense in re-evaluating after you’ve gutted the private sector and the NGO sector by taking all the four-year-olds out of the program.

Why can’t we take the resources and target it at the small communities that have nothing in the community that actually have the indications and the proof that early childhood development would actually benefit those folks? Why can’t we direct the resources in that direction? Why do we, as a government, have to do it and broadcast it in such a way as to actually do more harm than good in the regional centres? What option does our DEA have to opt out of implementing Junior Kindergarten?