I guess I’ll have to leave it at that. Again, I’m not encouraged. This Minister has absolutely failed our education infrastructure in this area and the need just accumulates year after year, as he well knows.
The second area I want to talk about is the reform and innovation section that leads major innovation and reform initiatives. I’d like to talk a little bit about the possibility of a guaranteed basic income initiative. Would the Minister consider looking at that concept, looking at the research that’s been done, looking at the Dauphin study and the gains that were achieved and lasted for 13 years, and considering how it might be tested as an innovative way to address some of our income assistance needs and so on in one of our regions, and I don’t have a druthers on which region.
I think there is considerable interest in this tool across the country and internationally, and I think partly because of the clear evidence of the Dauphin study. They found that even those families, and this was a top-up of basic income, so for many families they didn’t get any dollars. It was just that they had the assurance that if their income fell below a certain amount they would get topped up. Simply that assurance, that security had almost the same effect. Higher graduation rates. Women chose to have children in later years. They delayed having children for a few years. Health benefits and so on. Absolutely amazing benefits, the sort of benefits that we are looking for. I’m serious when I ask the Minister if he would look into it and consider a test case in the Northwest Territories. I don’t think it would be any more expensive than our rapidly increasing income assistance budget, but perhaps an assessment could look at that.