Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do want to take a moment to state that I do not see the MLA who just asked me the question as a coward. I see him as a very capable MLA, so I will start with that.

What have we done? What have we done so far? We put out the ad, and so again I will be releasing very soon where we are with the hiring practise. That will be coming up, by the latest, on Monday. I will be doing a Minister's statement on the polytechnic at that time. We have done visits, three visits to all three communities, and that was a lot. In fairness, when I went to the communities, there was a lot of fear-based. It took three visits to get them actually to feeling a place where they could see a future, that they can actually take hold of this and say it is the right thing to do, so that was very worthwhile, my time. We have also met with the community learning centres. Because there are 22 in different areas, we could not meet with them individually, so we had a teleconference with all of them to define what they see their strengths are and their needs are. We have done the draft of what the vision questions will be. I have submitted those to the MLAs. I believe I gave a timeline to get that information back so that the MLAs can give me final feedback on if the survey questions are appropriate. We are expecting that as soon as the beginning of next month. We will be submitting that out, the visioning out, throughout the Northwest Territories.

I know at the beginning the MLAs had asked me in committee if I would have an implementation plan, and I actually did not want to do that because I took the recommendation that said ECE is too entrenched, so I wanted to hold off, but I could not wait. As a person, I am a little bit "get her done," so we have started a draft implementation plan. Once this person is in place, they will take that draft and they will actually make it a final implementation plan. So we have done a little bit of work. We have much to do, but I am excited about the work to come.

Thank you to the Minister for the reply, and I appreciate the preparation that is under way. Residents, though, Mr. Speaker, although they are very excited about the opportunity that another level of education will provide to Northerners, they are still a little bit troubled to understand exactly what is undertaken, or what does a polytechnic university look like. Can the Minister maybe describe to us exactly what a polytechnic university looks like? What distinguishes it differently from Aurora College? Thank you.

A very broad question. In responding, can the Minister please take note of the time and the fact that we are not even halfway through questions? Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.

Okay. I am going to really try because, you know me, I like to talk. What is a polytechnic university besides Aurora College right now? A polytechnic university is actually really hand-on learning. It looks at taking in practicum plus the academic learning with that. So what it gives us that it does not have at Aurora College is that Aurora College is limited because it is a college. They have partnerships that can access university monies, but they don't actually get that money themselves. I don't know this money. It came out in a city report. I believe that it said that there was, like, $500 million floated through that we didn't access. We could only access a couple hundred thousand dollars of that money.

Moving into the polytechnic university will give us specializations in what our strengths are in the Northwest Territories, and it will also give us access to a lot more research money, which will lessen the dependency of Aurora College on the Government of the Northwest Territories, which is critical for sustainability.

Thank you to the Minister for the reply. The Minister has indicated a couple of times in previous replies and earlier in mine that there is soon, I guess, to be announced a new associate deputy minister. Once this particular ADM is hired, what will be the actual first steps and actions that this position or this person is going to have to take?

One of the first things, of course, that that person will have to do is get used to what he is walking into, or she is walking into. They will have to look at taking over the overall supervision, the operations of the normal day-to-day operations within all the campuses. Because we will be starting the vision exercise, they will be actually working with that close vision exercise, not only for the Northwest Territories, but taking that vision and then what we define as a vision of the Territories, they will be defining what the vision is for the polytechnic university. They will be taking our draft implementation plan, whatever state it is in, and finalizing that work. As well, they will be looking at their management team to make sure that they have the best-placed people in the best places. They have a lot of work to do in a short period of time. Like I said, I am a pretty hard Minister, and I want this done. I will be on them constantly to get er done.

Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife North.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you to the Minister for the reply. Clearly, there is lots of work to be done. As we know, we have little to no resources actually identified in this particular budget with regard to this initiative. There is a little bit of a concern toward how much are we actually cementing this initiative into the mandate of this Assembly. I would like to ask the Minister: what can we expect that will be done on this file in the remaining life of this Assembly? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Oral questions. Member for Deh Cho.