Mahsi, Madam Chair. One of the university question, Aurora College, all those create aspirations for the young at heart, young kids in the communities, some place they can go to in the North, some place close to home. I assume those are aspirations that they would have. I don't want to cut those aspirations off. It is probably inevitable that this will happen, but it may happen further down the road than we expect. There are factors that contribute to that. We heard from the Premier before that the federal government funds infrastructure, but they do not fund programming. With us being in a deficit mode and constantly raising our debt limit, are we going to be able to afford it? To staff it and to run the programs and to be associated with other recognized universities, that is going to cost a lot of money. Do we have the money for that?
Another big factor too, as my colleague from Monfwi alluded to, is the education levels in our small communities. I think we have got the majority of them on the outside here that don't have those education levels as in par with the rest of Canada. We have got probably a majority that through social passing up to grade 12, but anywhere from grades seven, eight, and nine. There are a lot of them that are up there. They are smart cookies out there. What is missing from the education in our small communities is the required sciences and the math because we don't have matriculation programs in the academic programming in our communities. We don't have chemistry. We don't have physics. We don't have biology. They are saying it is in distance learning but who actually is monitoring that? Where is the evaluation on that? I am a really big fan of evaluations to see if a program is actually working, and seeing who is taking advantage of it, and whether it is working for those people.
There is a majority out there who are going to aspire to hit any university. We have to fix that. That is what I have been harping on since day one when I got here back in October because it is just what it is. We are critically low levels in relation to the Yukon College, to a university, I don't believe they have a situation as the NWT because NWT, we have three large regional centres. One is Yellowknife. Two large regional centres that run Aurora College programming. That programming and those centres are very important to the two outlying communities, besides Yellowknife, because it is creating employment in those centres. Families have moved there. They have got a legacy; they have been living there forever. They are running hockey programs. They are running sports programs. These are all the educators who we brought in to the outlying communities to run the colleges. This is really concerning, when we are going to centralize the university in one place, because you have to think about the impacts that we are going to be leaving. We are setting up these communities to become ghost towns. It is already happening right now. I will tell you why it is happening right now. It is because the GNWT in the past has allowed to degradate the programming that was in the college and with the housing. I have seen that myself in Fort Smith. They weren't up-keeping or advancing or getting more programming moving North, concentrating on those centres and making them better places. We lost programming; we lost social services in those communities. I don't think they have a teacher education program there anymore. There could have been a lot more.
When I went there to continue my upgrading or whatever, I just say where is everybody? Everybody went south. They want to go south. Who doesn't want to go to school in Grand Prairie and Edmonton? That is what was happening. We were losing our own students because of not following our own policies with the GNWT for education funding, because some of the students were not allowed to fund their families in the communities to go to school in another community, where there are no student residences. They want to take their kids there because they have better education in the larger centres. We are not funding them for that, right in the territories. What we are doing is we are funding students to go take upgrading down South. That just doesn't make sense. We are not following any of our policies. That is what I have been watching from the outside for quite some time. You have to really think of that, what we are doing to the outside centres when we are going to make these decisions. I am not comfortable doing that, myself.
I did touch upon the programming and the funding that is all required, but I think we have to be cautious, throw caution to the wind, here, as we move forward. We can keep doing our studies and everything; we have to keep battling each other, saying, "No, no, no to this. We don't want it here. We want it over there." We have to join together for the future of the children of the Northwest Territories, but how we get there is a task in itself, and I would like to throw that caution to the wind for all to consider. Mahsi, Madam Chair.