I would like to refute the Minister’s assertion that this is beneficial to all communities. I just listed that when you take the four-year-olds out of all these other programs that are existing and have existed for many years with very good success, you can’t do it in the name of… and not all parents can afford early childhood development. There is no fee for service. There’s parents’ cooperative. There’s volunteerism that goes into the Hay River Cooperative Playschool. Parents are involved. That’s a good thing. The Treehouse, the parents are involved. The Growing Together, the parents come with the children. That’s a good thing. There is no fee for service on any of these early…Aboriginal Head Start. That’s not a daycare, per se. Anyways, I would like to counteract what the Minister said about that.
If this is about getting early childhood development to people who can’t afford it, then subsidize the few people who do want it and it is not optional. If you’re saying that Junior Kindergarten is going to be there regardless, it’s optional for the people to uptake, but it’s not optional for the DEA to implement it. So, I don’t know.
At our DEA meeting we talked about laying down on the road and I think we might end up having to do this on this, and I think the DEA should tell the department, in no uncertain terms, you’re not going to gut and you’re not going to ruin what we already have going in our community. Maybe there’s a few parents that go like, hey, great, my four-year-old is in school all day, I don’t need to pay for daycare, I’d say it’s very, very few. I don’t think it’s beneficial to Hay River, and like I said, we may lay down on the road. What’s going to happen to us when we do that? Thank you.