Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Helen Margaret (Hardisty) Edjericon was born to Sarah and William Hardisty in Fort Simpson on February 24, 1956. She was the ninth child in a family of twelve, four older brothers, and her parents predeceased her. Helen spent her childhood in Jean Marie but often spent the summer months in Fort Simpson so that her father and older brothers could maintain wage employment. Although the family lived through lean times, Helen was raised in a strict but loving Christian home. She attended school in Jean Marie River until grade six, grades seven to nine in Fort Simpson, and she completed her schooling at Sir John Franklin High School in Yellowknife.

After graduation, she returned to Fort Simpson and lived there for a few years until moving to Norman Wells to live with her older sister Shirley and family in 1977. In 1979, she returned to Fort Simpson and moved to Hay River to live with her older brother Ron and his family where she worked for the GNWT. She later moved to Inuvik until approximately 1981, when she moved to Yellowknife. It was while she was living in Yellowknife that she met her former husband, Richard Edjericon, and they married in July 1986. Their son, Dion, was born in 1984 and grandson, Deacon, was born in 2007. She started working for the Dene Nation in Yellowknife not long after moving there and worked there for more than 10 years.

Helen was known for her meticulous housekeeping and was also known for her cooking skills as well as her passion for bingo. She loved entertaining family and friends in her big house in Ndilo. Helen loved to talk, especially when she was younger, and her siblings used to tease her about it. She was friendly and outgoing. She had many friends in the places she lived in and was very athletic when she was young. During her years in Akaitcho Hall, she was part of the Akaitcho girls' basketball team and joined a women's basketball team in Inuvik when she moved there.

After her marriage broke down, she lived with her friends and family and continued until her health started failing her. Although Helen experienced difficulties in her life, she never lost her faith in God and her firm belief in Him. She will be sadly missed by her family and friends. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Member for Nahendeh. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family. Members' statement. Item 4, recognition of visitors in the gallery. Item 5, reports of committees on the review of bills. Item 6, reports of standing and special committees. Item 7, returns to oral questions. Item 8, acknowledgements. Item 9, oral questions. Member for Hay River South.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'd like to return to questions I was asking the Minister of Justice yesterday. I'd ask the Minister if he can tell me: for every $1 spent in dealing with addictions, how much is spent on drug and alcohol enforcement in the NWT? If he doesn't have the information, I'll give him time to get it at some point. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. Minister of Justice.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don't have the NWT-specific numbers, but I know that in Canada in 2014 is the most recent information I have. That's from a report prepared by the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction. For every $32 million spent on healthcare, there's about $10 million for healthcare for substance abuse, there's a corresponding $10 million spent on enforcement. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I'd ask the Minister: what is the average time for drug trafficking production, importing, exporting, to move through the justice system?

In adult criminal court according to Stats Canada, the average number of days it takes to get other drug offence is the technical term through the court system, and those would be things like drug trafficking, production, and importing and exporting, in the NWT in 2017-2018, it was 277 days, and the Canadian average -- sorry. That's the Canadian average, and in the NWT, it's 295 days. In 2018-2019, the Canadian average was 273 days, but in the NWT, the average was 413 days. That is because we are a small jurisdiction. If you have one large, complex case, that can skew the statistics, and there's ups and downs.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police proposed diverting people dealing with substance abuse or addiction issues away from the criminal justice system towards social services and healthcare. Can the Minister confirm that this is an approach the department agrees with, and if so, has it been put into practice?

It's an odd notion to treat addiction as a criminal matter, and so, I'm fully in support of diversion where we can and providing supports where we can. The GNWT has been providing alternatives to the traditional justice system for a number of years. Every year, we contribute $1.8 million to community justice programming which includes formal diversions. We have an annual priority established through a contract with the RCMP to prioritize diversions. A number of the sanctions from the community justice committees include things like counselling, cultural connection, and treatment.

The RCMP, as well, and they're committed to diversion, as well, they are very supportive of their local community partners. Here, in Yellowknife, there's the Yellowknife sobering centre, and in Behchoko, there's the warming centre. In Yellowknife, through those kinds of partnerships, they've seen a 73 percent decrease in the number of prisoners in cells from 2014 to 2018. In 2014, it was 6,500 individuals in cells, and we're down to about 1,700 now. There is a diversion away from that criminal system.

We also have integrated case management within the GNWT. In the South Slave, SMCC is transitioning to a therapeutic community model. It's still in the justice system, but it's trying to direct people out of it and then giving them the tools they need to overcome addictions and stay out of the system. We also have the Wellness Court, as well, which looks at the circumstances of the offender and tries to deal with those as opposed to looking at an offence and punishing someone for an offence.

We are trying different things. It's always tough. I understand now why my predecessor would always say this. We're dealing with people at the end of a lot of trauma and a lot of decisions that led them down this path. It's tough to change that course, but we are trying. We are committed to it.

Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary. Member for Hay River South.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The RCMP and police, in general, have been receiving bad press lately. This is disturbing when we consider the good work they do which never gets reported. Mr. Speaker, not only are our RCMP officers paid less than provincial counterparts, a past Auditor General report confirms that RCMP are understaffed and, because of it, receive adequate training. Mr. Speaker, can the Minister confirm what the department is doing to ensure our complement of officers in the NWT meet our needs in the North and that they are adequately trained? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I want to thank the Member for highlighting the positive contributions of the RCMP. I've stated before in the House that they don't do the kind of self-promotion that, perhaps, they could to get those accolades.

The NWT does have the highest concentration of RCMP officers in Canada. We have 416 per 100,000 people. The next highest is Nunavut with 354 per 100,000. We are staffed quite well with RCMP. In terms of the training, there's a significant amount of mandatory training that RCMP have, and in order to support that and support increased training because there's always new training every year, every time something happens, there's training in response to it, the department increased funding to the RCMP in 2019-2020 by $200,000 annually just for training, and that's the 70 percent contribution that the GNWT makes. In total, there was almost a third of a million dollars increase in training budget a couple of years ago.

I want to say, the Member mentions, the RCMP have been getting some bad press, but in my five years in this Assembly, no one has ever said they want less RCMP. Every community, every Member says they want more RCMP in the community and that they appreciate their efforts. The Member made a statement earlier in regards to a bear attack in Hay River, and it was the RCMP who responded to that and who dispatched the bear. They do a lot of good that isn't recognized, so I appreciate the Member's questions. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Deh Cho.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. My Member's statement alluded to the Auditor General's finding on education delivery by the department of education. Of interest, I noted the department piloted the junior kindergarten program across the territory during the 2017-2018 school year. The Auditor General's report stated the department's analysis of a small number of junior kindergarten students during the pilot program scored better on a number of indicators related to developmental readiness for learning. The report also goes on to state data from the JK program needed additional data to be collected over several more years to know whether the results were conclusive. Can the Minister provide information as to whether any data was collected in the years following the rollout of the junior kindergarten program? Mahsi.

Thank you, Member for Deh Cho. Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are significant benefits to early childhood education, and I think everyone would agree to that. The fact that we have junior kindergarten, anecdotally, means that there have been some benefits to children across the territory. To the specific question about the data that we've collected, the Department of Education, Culture and Employment has been collecting the early development instrument, the EDI tool, have been using data from that since 2013, and that includes the years since junior kindergarten has been in place from 2017. There needs to be a certain number of years of data collected so that you have a good baseline, and then, you can actually start drawing conclusions from that. We are at that point now where we can begin to look at how things change from year to year and draw conclusions on that so that we can measure the success of some of our programming. In terms of the data collection, yes, we're on that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We look forward to the findings of that rollout, considering we do have language immersion programs included in the JK programs up to grade four. The Auditor General notes the department made commitments to ensure equitable access to quality education for all the small communities but did not explicitly identify actions required to achieve this commitment. Can the Minister provide information as to why the commitments were not actioned to ensure quality outcomes or equitable access to education?

Since the first report in 2010, the department has taken a number of steps to make good on the Education Act's requirement to provide equitable access. I just want to comment on something the Member said earlier, that the department is "passing the buck" to the education authorities in terms of the failure of small communities in terms of education. I've been here five years, and I've never heard any Minister pass the buck. The previous Minister before me, I heard her state that we are failing students in small communities. The day I became Minister, that became my failure, so I'm not passing the buck. The education authorities are our partners, and I'm not putting blame on them. We're all in this together.

To the Member's question, a number of the actions include things like junior kindergarten. That expanded early childhood education across the territory in a way that has never been done before. There is a realization that, in small communities, the teachers and the principals need special training, so we provided special training specific to small-community principals and small-community teachers. Northern Distance Learning is one of the greatest ways that we've been providing more equitable access, and currently that program offers academic courses in grades 10 to 12 to students in small communities who go to schools where the teachers aren't there to teach those programs or the numbers of students aren't there to teach those programs. It really gives students who want to go on to university but are living in a small community the opportunity to do that.

We have recently changed our school capital standards. These are the requirements for what we put in schools when we build them, and we changed those with a recognition that small-community schools need certain things that they weren't getting before, things like gyms, things like spaces for Northern Distance Learning. One of the most significant things that has happened in the past number of years is access to mental health and counselling through the child and youth care counsellor initiative that we are partnering on with Health.

I take the Member's point. We are failing students in small communities. There are no two ways about it. The numbers show it, but I'm owning it. We're doing everything we can to rectify that.

I thank the Minister for those explanations, especially the "passing the buck" one that he kind of hooked on. The Auditor General's Report states that the department invested heavily in the Northern Distance Learning program, something he alluded to. Did the department evaluate the Northern Distance Learning program as it relates to meeting high-quality education outcomes?

We have done an evaluation on the program. It shows positive benefits, and those are reflected in the numbers. The students who are participating in these academic courses would otherwise have to take them through distance learning, traditional distance learning where you get, well, back in my day, you got a pack of CDs and some workbooks in the mail, and you had to fill those out. The success rates on those types of programs is very, very low; everywhere, not just in the territory. The credit acquisition rate in the territory for Northern Distance Learning has been significantly higher throughout the year. Going back over the years, it has been as high as almost 80 percent; it has been as low as 55 percent, in some years, but nonetheless, the students are getting these courses. They are making their way through the material, and they are passing these diploma exams that you have to pass if you're in Ulukhaktok or if you're in Edmonton. It is working, and we hope to expand it across the territory.

Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Monfwi.

Thank you, Member for Monfwi. Minister of Health and Social Services.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am going to take that question on notice.