Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will start by saying, definitely, there is a need for infrastructure for daycares. It is not in our program mandates at this time. I think it is something that we need to look at in the next Assembly. It's the end of this one. It's a couple of months left. However, I think it's bigger than that. I mean, thinking in the box says: give me a building, and I can make a daycare. However, I want to challenge it a little bit.
When I first took over the position of Minister of Education in April last year, my issue was not just about daycares. I talked about residential schools, and I talked about the drop-outs in schools and the absentees, the issues of parents even getting their children to school, which is a huge issue in our communities, some of the smaller ones. Again, I have been accused of being a visionary, and I often say, "What's the good of a politician without a vision?"
My vision actually, and that was from April last year, was that any new build in smaller communities of schools, we should be looking at those schools as hubs, not just the literacy and numeracy, which we need, but also having a place like we did with housing, that the health department can stop in, so nurses can do immunizations, so that we can have a daycare, maybe Aboriginal Head Start, within the school, so changing the dynamic, making the schools the hubs of communities so that people who have been traumatized by the residential schools, by our own systems of schools, will break down those barriers and they will actually start looking at schools in a positive light.
What I am saying is that that's not going to happen overnight. We have 20-year plans in capital, but what I am saying is that we need to challenge our own beliefs on what daycares look like and think outside the box. We need to look at infrastructure where we can for buildings, standalone, but we also need to look, in my opinion, as schools as hubs of communities to deal with the issues, multitude of issues, that we have with helping children to succeed. Thank you, Mr. Chair.