Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I appreciate those comments from the Minister and obviously, you know, she's been busy with us so she can only do so much with one -- I don't know what I'm trying to say here. But there's only one Caitlin. And she's in this building right now so she can't meet so maybe we should wrap so she can go off to her meetings.
But I guess I just wanted to highlight, you know, for the Minister and her staff, you know, this area's a high priority for me. Certainly growing spaces is the big one. You know, in my riding, it's something that I heard from a lot of parents about. There's a lot of people in Yellowknife, and I'm sure outside of Yellowknife, are facing even more difficult circumstances, who just want to be able to find a space for their children. And as the Member for Great Slave pointed out yesterday, or the other day, that the Hunger Games reference was a bit of an unfortunately apt analogy there in that, you know, families are really fighting. And you know, I've been hearing stories about people signing their unborn children up for daycare just knowing how long the waitlist is. So somebody gets pregnant, and they're on the list because they know that they're going to be waiting a minimum of a year to find out. So certainly we need to be working with our operators, finding out what they need, and I personally am willing and very interested to hear from the Minister what comes out of those talks and what is needed to help grow this sector, to put them in the position where they want to grow or they want to increase the number of spaces because what they've told me is that -- you know, speaking to one operator in particular -- they were very clear with me -- we would love to double our capacity but we can't do it if we're not being given the money that we need to operate effectively. And so I just wanted to make sure that those comments made it to the floor.
I think that we've had a lot of good discussions in the House over the past couple days about this, and I think we've made it clear to staff where our priority lies on this and so I don't need to belabour the point further but did want my comments on the record. I think that's it for this section for me for now. Thank you, Mr. Chair.