Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the Minister for what has been outlined in the Minister's statement. I appreciate the ongoing work that the Minister and the department are doing in early childhood.
However, the statement indicates a lot of good things as a relates to programming, it relates a lot of good things from age four on, but a lot of this may be for naught if we cannot invest in zero-to-three in the right way, as well. The Minister is aware that, of course, absolutely the basic needs of families and communities is to be able to take care of their children, and the Minister is aware of a circumstance in my riding that happened late last year, where a daycare closed suddenly and there were 30 families, I believe about 42 kids, who were kind of scrambling to find an alternative for daycare, but they clearly had no options. A lot of the daycare facilities within the city, brand new ones, in fact, have waiting lists of over 100 kids.
The department has stated in the past that it does not want to interfere in the private-market-driven industry of daycare, but I am here to tell you that the private market is not providing daycare spaces. Our communities are simply too small to generate a business case for the private market to invest in, and there is no return on investment; the building and fire codes are a big challenge, and so there is nobody who is going to put an investment into the market of getting into the daycare business.
Clearly, in my view, there just will not be the required daycare spaces that we need without a government commitment to new capital for infrastructure funding. I am not talking about programming anymore. I am not talking about services anymore. I am talking about the department starting to identify a need for investment in capital infrastructure. I am of the belief that, once these structures are in place, that these assets are in place, that these daycares in place, that NGOs and parent organizations can start to organize to be able to operate them, but they are not going to put the investment into the bricks and mortar.
We know that, for sure, there is a dire need for infrastructure. We know that there are big waiting lists. We know that there are 11 communities without daycares. We know that this is also driving families or parents to have to take kids to unlicensed daycares, and, of course, we do not want to see that. We are a government that puts hundreds of millions of dollars into our healthcare infrastructure. We have done a lot of that in recent years. We are putting a lot of money into junior kindergarten as well as schools and Aurora College for our education infrastructure. However, we have seemingly no vision, much less commitment to capital investment, in daycare infrastructure.
The Minister is well aware of a recent request. We are grateful for the support on that request. That shows that little pockets of money can go to improving an existing asset to help get that asset up to code so that we can turn it or convert it into a daycare. That can happen in many of the communities. The Housing Corporation in fact owns a lot of assets in communities that are borderline boarded up, not because they are necessarily derelict, but because maybe they do not have enough people to fulfill programming, so maybe that could be a building that could be considered to be converted over into daycare.
Essentially what I would like to do is just simply ask the Minister what her views are around this and does she recognize that this actually is a dire situation that we have as it relates to supporting daycares? Will the Minister start to have discussions with her department, with stakeholders, with parents and others about what the department and what the Government of the Northwest Territories might be able to do to start investing in daycare infrastructure, similar to schools, similar to healthcare facilities? Thank you, Mr. Chair.