Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, this is a follow-up to my earlier question about the Ingraham Trail. There has been a commitment by this government for three or four years that the cottage leases on Commissioner's land will be offered for sale, fee-simple, to the present owners. There have been some problems because of ongoing land claims and treaty discussions, but does the Minister see that within the next year some of these lots on Commissioner's land will be offered to the present occupants?

I thank the deputy minister for that. I take it then, Mr. Minister, we have a commitment that if there were problems in the past caused by oversights on the part of MACA or the city that the department will work at resolving those and that we can look forward in the future to a new system which will mean we can avoid these sorts of problems.

I will tell the Minister there has been an ongoing debate in this city about assessed values of the downtown as opposed to the large developments out in the suburbs of the city. There is a strong school of thought that it is not a level playing field. There have been court cases and numerous appeals. It gets to the very fundamental basis of how a city can operate and how a business community can thrive. If the Minister could give the commitment that the problems in the past will be resolved and that working with all parties, we hope to devise a system that will avoid these problems in the future.

I just have one question to do with assessment in the city of Yellowknife. There have been some problems with controversy over the years between some of the

downtown business people and city council. There has been some controversy about the actual assessed value of land downtown. This has gone on for a number of years and has caused quite a bit of concern. I just wonder if the Minister could give me an update. There has been a number of appeals, discussions, assessment board rulings, et cetera. So the situation is confusing. Is there any clarity that we can look forward to receiving?

Yes, that answers part of the question, and I am aware of the difficulty. I just have a comment that on the Ingraham Trail, even though there are a lot of different users and there is a lot of different potential for that land, I think there is some possibility right now, if the department tried to bring everyone together again, for some trade-offs there. I know the Yellowknives Dene Band have some aspirations and I think some of those aspirations could be met without a tremendous amount of difficulty. I think that it is a matter that the city also has some longer term plans, the cottage owners want to get ownership, and in just talking to different parties, I get a sense that if somebody was willing to get in there and broach some arrangements, I think there is some possibility there. What I have heard from each individual group is a certain willingness to sit down and see if they can sort out some compromises on the trail. So, I wonder if I could ask the Minister if he and the department are prepared to continue to try to facilitate some compromise solutions as to the management of the Ingraham Trail?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The explanation given by the Minister of Finance becomes one of a certain amount of subjectivity. Some of these objectives I thought were somewhat complex and may cause some difficulty for the department. If what the Minister of Finance and MACA are saying is that none of these objectives should cause you any problems, then I will be satisfied with that. I will expect to see a successful resolution of all of these issues by the end of the year.

But, one that I will ask, if I could, Mr. Chairman, specifically, one that is -- as the deputy minister knows and as the Minister is probably becoming aware -- quite complex, is the management strategy for the Ingraham Trail area. There are a lot of conflicting uses on the Ingraham Trail. There is mining. There are the objectives of the Yellowknife Dene Band. They are talking about increasing the size of their area and they will be involved in treaty discussions and negotiations over the next few years. There is the desire of many of the cottage owners to own their own cottages. There has been a long-standing objective of the department to come up with some kind of a management plan of the area, because, from time to time, as the deputy minister remembers, these conflicting uses give us a lot of problems. So, this is quite definitive here as your objective is to implement the management strategy. I would be very supportive of you doing that, but I just wonder, though, how the Minister intends to proceed, then, in implementing this management strategy for the Ingraham Trail area.

Then I will get a clarification of the answer. The question I thought was quite clear. The department has put forward 27 definitive objectives for the year. The Standing Committee on Finance thought that this department, along with all of the other departments, are putting forward a number of areas they wanted major work done on during the year and we wanted to get an idea on how they intended to do that. The reason we had asked for something more detailed was to go through your major objectives with resources that will be necessary to complete them, the time frames and some basic ideas of how you intend to complete

them. Under municipal operations and assessment it says, "To develop incentives that will support municipal governments' efforts to hire staff with appropriate qualifications." I have no idea what that means. We had hoped that we would get more detailed clarification of each one of these objectives. Even in the two we have, there isn't much detail. So we are not further ahead in getting a better idea of what you want to achieve.

There are two ways to do it. We could go through each one in detail and have you respond. But we thought it would save us all time and effort just to have it written down so we could ask questions about the ones that weren't clear. That was what I was asking. Your answer confuses me a bit more. Are these two initiatives new since you were before the Standing Committee on Finance? Have you added two new initiatives to this list?

There seems to be a number of other definitive objectives which are also supposed to take place during the course of the year. Some of them will take a bit of work in order to carry them out. For example, you are going to implement a management strategy for the Ingraham Trail. We wanted an idea of how you intended to complete these. All of these definitive objectives, theoretically, should be realizable during the year. What was the process that made you choose just these two and what does that mean? These two are going to be done by March 1995, but what happens to the rest of them on your list?

Mr. Chairman, as a general comment, the Standing Committee on Finance is generally satisfied with the work of this department. We do have one question. There were, I think, 27 definitive objectives put forth by the department in the main estimates book. It was the observation of the standing committee that most departments seem to have quite a large number of objectives for the year. A definitive objective is supposed to be an objective that can be realized reasonably within the course of a year. We asked for some detail from each department as to how they were actually going to complete their objectives, when they took specific time frames, et cetera.

I observe that we have received a page of 1994-95 initiatives back from the department. It just has two objectives on the page. Perhaps the Minister could explain to me how this all works. Are these two the two they expect to get done and they don't expect to get the rest done? Or, are these the two most important ones? Or, do we only have a partial list and the rest of the information is forthcoming?

I appreciate that. I guess the lesson for all of us is that there is no one single solution. There has to be a range of solutions and there have to be people prepared to be flexible and reasonable. I think everything is manageable if you look at it that way. I still would ask the Minister to look at the special case of the centre in Yellowknife. Having met with the parents, the Minister will recognize the frustration and despair that parents have when they have kids with learning disabilities who aren't making it in the system.

When they find a lifeline and for the first time start to see some positive results, that's more important than a dry discussion about policy. We're talking about their kids and hopeless situations. Now there are some results. When we are talking about flexibility, I also think that there are going to be some

cases where compassion and common sense will dictate that something may not fit exactly in a policy but it makes sense.

I would just ask the Minister to be sympathetic towards that particular school. They have quite an extraordinary teacher. Beulah Phillpot has been working with these kids for a long time and they are really, really getting somewhere. They are making progress with these kids. What I would like to see the government doing and the Department of Education doing is when they see success, build on it. As opposed to saying well, your success doesn't fit in with our policies and therefore, we will ensure that ultimately, you'll fail. That doesn't make sense. If they are out there, let's embrace them. Let's change our policies and be proactive in that area.

The last thing I would like to talk about is the recommendation of the Standing Committee on Finance and the partners for youth model. As the Minister knows, and all of us who have been working in government for a few years now, dealing with social problems is probably the most difficult task any of us have and it doesn't lend itself readily to solutions. It is very frustrating and very difficult. If anything, the situation is getting worse rather than better. If you look at this from a school perspective, social problems that have accumulated obviously come into the school. Whatever they are, they manifest themselves in different ways in the school whether it's aggressive behaviour in the playground, or kids aren't able to learn because they didn't have breakfast that morning, the whole range, kids who have been abused. I think it's very important to try to deal with it.

In a lot of communities, the school is the one common place where everybody in that generation for a certain period of time is there. So you can capture a total audience or a target group. Anywhere else you do it in the community you get bits and pieces of it. If you decide that early intervention is important...I think it really is, I think it's key. What the corrections department does, for instance, at the other end costs five times as much to keep them in jail than it does to do something when people are young and much more likely to have success. The studies have shown that if you deal with it in the school it has a tremendous positive impact on the community itself, it spills out. I see the school of the future in the north becoming more of a centre point in a community, more of a focal point that we've seen before as we get more into communications, into modern technology, in to a whole range of options available in the 1990s .

As long as I remember, we've always talked about, and every report that has ever come out that has dealt with social problems always talked about departments having to work together. We've heard that and everybody agrees.

The problem with the way governments are structured in Canada, departmental structures, is that it is functionally impossible to do that, with all the best intentions. It becomes difficult to do because there are vertical hierarchies and the cross linkages aren't there. It's not anyone's fault. I know your deputy Minister works very hard at those relationships. But it is difficult to formalize those relationships on an ongoing basis. A lot of time, it depends on certain individuals who are enlightened enough to see it only works if you work together.

One reason is that from the top down, the concept of harmonization between departments hasn't worked because, structurally, it's difficult. One thing they've found with school-based social delivery programs -- and I talked to people in San Diego where they are using it -- in the inner cities now, in some of the larger cities in the States, where they have much worse social problems than us. They have terrible social problems, a total breakdown, really, of social order in some of the ghettos of the United States -- is that by bringing together in the school, a social worker, nurse, parole officer and the police, the school becomes their point of contact. It's not their departments, but real people actually working together there in the trenches. It is much more difficult far away, like in Yellowknife or in the regional centre.

They found that just having these resources available in the school -- and there is a pilot project in Edmonton, also -- that the costs aren't that much larger. You just refocus where your resources are used and you're able to do a number of things. Things like violence in the schools go down considerably because there are people right there. Second, you're able to identify problem kids very early and you're able to intervene very early with those kids, with a much better chance of providing assistance to them. Third, the positive things in the school start to spread to the community around it. It has really worked.

Like I said, there's no magic in anything. And there is no magic in this solution like any other solution, but the committee feels very strongly that this model is worth a very serious try. We would really like to see this set up in every region by the next school year. Obviously, in some areas, you are not going to have a group of 15 people, as they have in Edmonton. In some regions, it might make sense to have three or four people. Practical reality and common sense will make this thing work. I would just like to hear the Minister's initial response to this type of approach.