Thank you, Mr. Chair. Reflecting on some other commentary that has been made, I think junior kindergarten is a good idea, but the devil is always in the details. One of the unintended consequences of the program has been making the private daycare industry basically untenable from a revenue standpoint and pricing private spaces out of the market. We have dealt with that in this Assembly very recently, and it was not a straightforward solution.
Given that, given that there is going to be an ever-increasing need for daycare when the Minister has said earlier that parents in Yellowknife understand they have to pay $800 to $1,000. I remember paying that, and it did not make my life easy. It was very difficult. For many parents who are either in a single-income household or even modest income, that is living paycheque to paycheque because of daycare fees. You need to work in this town. There is no option around it. We do need to head for these spaces. Things like initiatives, the policy environment that supports junior kindergarten has also shut down viable private industry.
I guess the idea is: we have seen well-costed proposals for universal daycare in the Northwest Territories with, I think, a $20-million price tag that this Assembly considered early on and then dropped because it wasn't fiscally feasible in our current lifespan. If we don't do something, if we just kind of keep trying to tweak things here and there or hope that incremental change will solve this problem, we are never going to address these kind of fundamental challenges of creating daycare spaces for families in the Northwest Territories. There are communities where the GNWT is sitting on many assets that aren't currently in use that could be repurposed to that.
The Minister spoke about her long-term vision, but when are we actually going to start developing that long-term vision? Because, if we continue on this path, we are always going to leave some families unrepresented with their childcare needs. If you can't deliver that as a government that has set out to do this as a way to address the cost of live, a way to ensure kids have healthy starts, et cetera, et cetera, we are going to be failing the people we have set out to help if we don't address these unintended consequences.
We need more than just tweaks. We need more than just subsidies. We need to find a real transformative change to the system that is going to create more spaces, affordable spaces. If that means the government has to be the daycare provider for parents of the Northwest Territories, then so be it. What is the Minister planning to do with these long-term problems? I know it is a future government's issue, but we need to start that work now. Thank you.