Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate this opportunity to comment on the department’s budget. I welcome the Minister and his staff. I think in the Minister’s opening comments it had a lot of keywords that the Members are very interested in: early childhood development, education renewal, cost of living, supports to those most vulnerable and so on. I was happy to see the capacity to both re-profile and achieve new funding for key initiatives in this department.
On the income assistance side there are a number of expenditures planned to improve that situation. I think it is $6.6 million over the next four years starting with our first fiscal year coming up. This, based on my written questions earlier in the term, would bring income assistance up to about $26 million. So we are steadily increasing the amount of subsidy we are putting forward for supporting our residents, but I would ask the question: how many people is this getting out of poverty as opposed to supporting them in poverty? How many people is this getting a job as opposed to supporting them in their unemployment? How many people is this reducing health care requirements for as opposed to keeping them in unhealthy situations and housing and so on?
We saw that a guaranteed annual income was a completely different model in the one comprehensive test done in Canada where it was done in a five-year run with an additional eight years of comprehensive monitoring was proven to test those sorts of things. Where is the innovative thinking? Is there an openness to consider doing this in one region? I would even support this for the Minister’s region or the Sahtu or wherever. Rather than just do the same thing harder and bumping up our subsidies every year without addressing these common issues, there is an opportunity to seek a more effective way in dealing with them in a more effective way that removes the issues.
Education renewal is something the Minister is getting a lot of feedback on and I would like to add my voice in support of this. I appreciate, in particular, the bit of focus and the concept of self-regulation, something that teachers are familiar with these days and I have learned a little bit about, and I also think we need the social and emotional learning approach. Perhaps that’s already considered in the Education Renewal Initiative.
Ultimately, I prefer to see the Education Renewal Initiative adopt the Finnish education model, as I’ve spoken about before. Yet, I see the direction we are taking with education renewal is at least a step in that direction and I’m happy to see that.
I’m not sure how this exactly fits in with the system-wide review. I would be interested in hearing more about that, and maybe that’s an ECE as opposed to a system-wide review. I’m not sure I have that right. I know the Minister did make a comment, a system-wide review of the education system. Where does education renewal fit in that? Again, I see a real opportunity in that case to explore how we can adopt and adapt the Finnish education system which has proven highly successful to our northern jurisdiction.
The expansion of early childhood development, I know the Minister knows it does my heart good to see investments in this area. Depending how those dollars are spent, are we going to have another iPad fiasco? Is this Chevron dollars or another fossil fuel agency that’s getting free advertising, government-sponsored advertising? I hope not. I hope that these are real on-the-ground programs, community-based programs that will work with families, parents-to-be and young families, as the Minister says, zero to five. We need to provide the students with fertile minds when they enter into the education system. They are quite different approaches there.
The Skills for Success Initiative I think is quite good in theory, but I would be concerned, as many others have who speak to me, over the trend to believe that we know through the influence of industry on us exactly what sort of skills are needed out there. To me and others, we are supporting the production
of automatons, the big wheels of some rig, away from home and family with this sort of thinking. So I throw out a caution there. I think education should be focused on allowing students to develop their full potential. That’s been demonstrated to be the best for the economy, for the well-being of families and so on. That’s treading a line there, so I would urge the Minister to be cautious in that regard.
Decentralization, if there is any department that should already be decentralized, I expect it would be ECE. If or when this happens, I hope the department will look at a region with a very low ratio of government jobs per capita such as the Tlicho and Sahtu regions, for example. South Slave, of course, has a higher ratio even than the North Slave and I don’t see that kind of accommodation in the decentralization policy.
This is my last item. There is still a serious deed to provide Aurora College with the academic freedom that every other such institution in Canada enjoys and this one does not. I think that’s limiting them. There are some inefficiencies there, still misreporting and whatnot. I see we approved them for budgets in the mains. Their year-end report shows that they way overspend and somehow get the money from the department and not infrequently end up with a surplus, quite different numbers than what we approve. So there is a considerable amount of murkiness still with the whole Aurora College situation. I know we have tried to work on this, but we haven’t been successful. I think it’s a fertile area to keep examining and tuning up. The fundamental thing provides the academic freedom such an institution should have.
I will leave it at that, Mr. Chair. I look forward to the detail, but I would appreciate any remarks the Minister might have. Thank you, Mr. Chair.