Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I know that this one, it's phase 1 and phase 2, but phase 1 was an important part of this legislation. Phase 1 is the one that, you know, that included to work with the Indigenous government. And I still feel that this Minister missed the opportunity of working with the Indigenous government to modernize the Education Act. This was a step for us, for especially with the Indigenous government and this would have been a good start to the reconciliation. And they missed that. They missed that opportunity. And that is why a lot of Indigenous government, they were opposed with the phase 1. Phase 2. I mean, phase 2 is also important, it's good, but that's after the fact. It was the phase 1. For the first time, the Indigenous government would have been part of working on the education system for their people. But no, we were left out. So I still feel that they missed the opportunity because, you know, just like what my colleague said over there, Ron and Caitlin and Katrina, talking about the education system, you know, on the tour and a lot of people did say that, you know. And I don't mean to discredit anyone. I don't mean to discredit the Indigenous teachers, language teachers; they are doing their best. But we are lacking a lot of resources in small communities. And we even have some schools that are still teaching multi grade. I mean, that's -- that's not right because there lots of kids are falling through the crack. You know, they're not getting the proper education. When a teacher is focusing on grade 1 and 2, like, and 3, and only have one support sometimes, they don't have the support, so the teacher is teaching all grades in one class. Those kinds of things have to stop. And we don't even have access to speech and language pathologists in a lot of small communities.
This is one of the things that we're -- the department can come in, wait and fix if later. It's too later for many by then because you can't do nothing. There's -- that's where lots of -- a lot of young kids, we noticed that they quit because they can't function. They miss out on lots of things. So this is where I think -- that's why I said that, you know, this was -- phase 1 was the one that -- we could have made lot of the mistakes that were made in the past right through this in phase 1. Phase 2 is okay. That's after, like I said. But I think that -- it's just more program and more resources is needed in small communities so that our young people can catch up so we can have -- we all want a lot of our youth to be educated in two languages, you know, and we all want our kids to become doctors, lawyers, astronauts, all those high level professionals that in other regions take advantage of. We can't take advantage of any of those things because we're still lacking. And I know that today is the Orange Shirt Day, and I know that a lot of -- I heard lot of comment made before that education starts from the house, from our home. But how can it -- how can that be when a lot of these young -- these parents did not know how to parent and they just -- and it goes to the next generation, and that's why we have 98 percent of children in child welfare systems. So this is where I think we could have made all those -- the mistakes that were made from the beginning, we could have fixed it.
And I don't blame -- I don't blame any of those Indigenous government that wants to take over the education program because they don't want their next generation to go through what our past generation, us, we went through. We don't want that. And we want our kids to function at that level. And it's just -- yes, larger regional centre do have the advantage and we don't. And even us in Tlicho region, where just right next door we're still being denied a lot of programs and services and we have to come to Yellowknife to access those. Even for speech and language, some of those parents they have to come here. And for small communities in Sahtu, you know, like, they have to come here or Inuvik to access those programs. And it's just really, really frustrating, and this is where -- like, what I would like to see for the next government is that more programs and services should be going out to the small communities and start focusing on the little kids. We still have hope, we can still do it; it's just that we need more resources. And let's not focus too much on larger regional centre because we have the same rights as anybody else. Our kids have the same rights as anybody else. And this is very shameful for me even to talk about it, to say these things. It's really shameful. And it shouldn't be like that. Thank you.