Mr. Speaker, I would first like to start with saying I found it very interesting that the MLA actually expressed her mandates for education, culture and employment because, in my personal opinion, we need more women in leadership. Nothing against our Premier, I love our Premier, but wouldn't it be wonderful to see a woman Premier that could actually give mandates out to departments? I would like to start with that.
What are my mandates? Of course, I do have to listen to our Premier because I do respect him and I like the man very much. He has actually given me a direction that I have to abide by. I also recognize that I have to abide by the mandate commitments that were made at the beginning of this Assembly by all of us, together.
Personally, what I want to do on top of that, recognizing yesterday too that a really wise statement was said, that, when there are too many priorities, you have no priority, I took heed to that last night and I thought about that because that is true. However, I'm a workaholic, and I'm going to move forward.
What I would like to see done besides the mandates from the Premier, the mandates from the House, is I think we need to focus on early childhood development. One of the mandates is getting daycares into the communities. We have problems with drop-outs. We have problems with kids getting into schools, so I would like to see a daycare like a school, that becomes a hub for a community. I have already given direction to look at a pilot with that. If I can, the basic would be putting in a daycare into a community setting. The ideal would be putting a child development centre into a school setting. That's one thing I'm working on.
We need to look at our JK to 12, actually. We have children that are dropping out, so we need to look at what's going on. I'm a big supporter of the Pathways Program. I'm liking that we are going to be strengthening it to actually work with younger children so that we give them the choices and the options when they finish school and we talk to them about the skills they will need and the courses, the curriculum that they will need to be able to succeed in their future.
Post-secondary, definitely, it's been on the table for not only this Assembly, many Assemblies. We need to make sure that, not only our post-secondary, that every education support we have is based on best practices, that we look at making sure that we do cross-jurisdictional, we have measurable outcomes, we have evaluations in place. That's a priority for me.
Languages, absolutely need to do that. I was honoured to have the language officials here today because we need to strengthen them.
Income security, we need to look at that productive choice things. We need to look at self-employment in small communities and, if I can, move that into a productive choice. Because, in small communities, we have no employment, so let's see if we can look at self-employment options in our productive choices.