I look forward to the discussions with the Minister and Members from this side on the idea.

The mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission includes a missing child project. I’d like to know what attempts, if any, have been made by the Department of Health and Social Services to identify missing children who have died while attending residential schools in the Northwest Territories.

Mr. Speaker, I don’t believe that it is the mandate of Health and Social Services to address that particular question. I know

that question has been asked of by the Department of Justice in the past and I don’t know the status of the response, so I’m not the right person to answer that question, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.

Mr. Speaker, can the Minister inform the House… I would like to ask him if he would talk to the Minister of Justice on this issue here, because it does have some mental and health issues associated with families in our small communities who have children who have not returned back to the communities. It has caused mental anguish, some suffering to the parents and the families. That’s part of the legacy of residential school issues that we’re faced with.

Can the Minister meet with the Department of Justice and see how this issue is being dealt with by the Government of the Northwest Territories?

Mr. Speaker, I’m certainly happy to sit down with the Minister and have that conversation, but I’d like to encourage the Member to maybe join us. It is an issue that the Member has brought forward and I think it might be better for the Member to hear it from the Minister himself. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you. Minister of Transportation, Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve had the regional superintendent from Transportation meet with the chief and council. They wish to meet and discuss the hours of operation of the Lafferty ferry. Also, we’ve looked at what hours are possible for the operation that we have and the employees we have on the ferry. Thank you.

That’s great. Like I said in my Member’s statement, I know we’re getting support from the leadership in Fort Simpson. There are three councils: the Metis, the LKFN and the Village of Fort Simpson. But residents are also saying they like the idea of a 7 a.m. start; they really want to keep the 12 p.m. closure at midnight.

If the department really wanted to cost-save by adding an extra hour, how much of a barrier would the Minister see of extending it one more hour so that all the needs of Fort Simpson businesses and constituents can be addressed? Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, with the amount of employees that we have and the hours of operation and start-up time and shutdown time, the barrier is the Canadian Labour Code. They only allow an individual doing that type of work to work a maximum of 60 hours. With the shifts, I think we’re very close to that. Adding an extra hour means that individuals will be over that time allotment. That is the barrier right now, so I don’t know what the alternative would be.

Just on that, I know that it’s going from a 16 hour day to a 17 hour day, and the department had initial concerns about, and I think the Minister said it as well, about approaching their weekly work limits. As I brought this to constituents, as well, they’re saying, well, wait a minute, in Fort Providence they were running from 6 a.m. until 12 p.m. and they didn’t have those same concerns, so maybe the Minister can elaborate exactly what the concern is from going to 16 to 17 hours, recognizing that they had done 18 hours running the Merv Hardie.

I’m not familiar with how many employees that were on the Merv Hardie at Fort Providence is at this time and how they worked the hours to get all of the individuals that are working at this time into those hours and still stay within the allowable codes for the Canadian Labour Code. I would have to investigate what had occurred at that point back in the Merv Hardie so that we were able to run that. I understand that some of the difference could be the fact that the ferry had to run longer, so we made compensation by adding employees due to the volume of traffic in Fort Providence.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. In just evaluating the extension of the hours, I would suggest a test run, as well, to see if it’s doable from 7 a.m. until midnight. I would suggest a test run. I’m not saying that we do a full implementation of a ferry change, but if we can do a test run, we can test all these parameters and see if there is additional cost. It might be for the remainder of the summer there. Like I said, it will be a small change for a big benefit for the residents of Fort Simpson and the Nahendeh region.

I will have the department look at that possibly. I do believe that we have a certain amount of staff, like I indicated, and then we were getting close to that maximum, so if we were to do something different, I think we would have to add staff. I will have the department go back and

look at that. At this time, as I indicated, the labour code seems to be the issue, and that we had talked to the members of the Liidlii Kue First Nation and their feeling was that if we had a 16-hour window that we could slide, that they would prefer to stay with the current hours and not open at 7:00 a.m.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Education in follow-up to my Member’s statement.

Over the last year there have been a number of cuts to our funding for the Beaufort-Delta Education Authority due to the pupil-teacher ratio, which is changed from 8 to 1 to now 16 to 1. Now the DEA is actually basically being forced to implement the junior kindergarten.

I’d like to ask the Minister, why is he setting up junior kindergarten to fail?

Thank you, Mr. Blake. The Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, Mr. Lafferty.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. We introduced junior kindergarten through the work of the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative and a lot of research has been done. This is an area that has been earmarked as a success, focusing on early childhood at age four. Based on the feedback that we received, even just as late as a week ago, out of the 29 communities we have 22 that registered to enter into the establishment of junior kindergarten in the Northwest Territories. In fact, one just came in just the other day from Aklavik. Aklavik wants to join as member 23 out of 29. It’s over 70 percent that are interested and they want to move forward on this. We see a huge success in this particular area from what we’ve seen in other jurisdictions as well. This is junior kindergarten that we have been sharing from the elders and from the community leaders, so we will continue to move forward on that.

The communities are well aware of the program and they see what promise this program has, but with 18 new students both in Aklavik and Fort McPherson, there is a big increase in the demand that that takes on.

Will the Minister make sure that he provides the funding that he gave the pilot projects this year to the schools for next fall?

We will be continuing to contribute to the school boards to establish this type of programming in the communities. As I stated in this House, I did commit

that if it’s beyond 16 to 1 ratio on the teacher ratio basis, then obviously there will be a difference of a new funding formula towards those organizations and towards the school boards. These are the commitments that I have made in the House and I will continue to live up to it. It’s 16 to 1, and anything beyond that we will provide additional funding to the school boards.

Maybe the Minister didn’t hear me. The funding that’s being provided with the 16 to 1 ratio is not adequate.

Will the Minister ensure that that ratio be changed to at least 10 to 1?

When we talk about a 10 to 1, it could be upwards of $10 million to $20 million that we could be faced with our fiscal constraints at this point. The fiscal reality is that I don’t have access to $20 million available to me, so we have to be creative and innovative with our existing programming and our existing funding. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve reached out and this is an area that we feel that we can move forward on. We’re still under the PTR 16 to 1 ratio, and if it’s anything beyond that, I committed in the House that there will be funding provided to those individual school board authorities.