Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To be honest, it goes beyond the 19 of us in this House. We also have a lot of partners with the education authorities and the board chairs, and we don't always come to an agreement. When we're putting one message out there and we have other education authorities, it could be even other Members putting a different message out there, it's not putting out the best face in favour of us as a government. So obviously we've all got to work together and that messaging has to be a shared and common message moving forward, and, as I mentioned, it goes beyond the 19 of us. We have...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank all the honourable Members for all their comments and their concerns, and over the past three weeks there's a lot of common theme that every honourable Member has mentioned here today. I don’t really want to get into detail regarding those, but first off I just really do want to emphasize that this Department of Education, Culture and Employment does, in fact, do a lot of good work as well in the territory. We have a lot of good employees who do a lot of good work for residents, whether it's in income assistance, the JK-to-12 system, post-secondary...

Can I confirm: does the Member want our communications protocol? Can the Member confirm? Thank you.

Yes, I do, Mr. Chair.

I'll go to my deputy minister for that one. Thank you

Based on the enrolment and the size of the school as well community size and population, there are a lot of criteria that comes into play here and also standards within the school. When working with the school boards, obviously it varies from community to community. We have another situation such as Colville Lake where we're looking at building the school to a set standard. The community wants to make some changes, so they have to go and look for third-party funding as well. So it's working with the school boards and we just follow the standards that are set out in legislation.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the honourable Member for recognizing that our teachers are overworked, averaging 52 hours a week. Research has shown that when teachers have the opportunity to have prep time and prepare for their courses, that students get a quality education, they have enough time to provide quality education, and this was something that came out of a legally binding agreement, collective agreement, between the Teachers' Association and the Government of the Northwest Territories.

If the Member would like, the honourable Members would like, we can resend the package that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the Member's interest in this program. It's been an ongoing issue in the Court of Appeal since January 2015. The most recent update is that we have finalized the schematic design that was approved by both the CFSTNO and the departments. It has gone out for an RFP with the standard gym as the basis for evaluation with the option price for the expanded regional-sized gym that can be selected solely based on the GNWT discretion.

The RFP will close March 10, 2017, and we're expecting to break ground spring of this year and hopefully have the work completed...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We are an education system. There are a lot of partners at the table. It is specifically around instructional hours. We have the NWT Teachers' Association, educational authorities, ourselves, the Department of Education, Culture and Employment. If the Member is wanting us to do another information blitz, getting out there and letting the public know, again, we would have to do that in cooperation with our partners that came to an agreement on the instructional hour times. We want to get that information out there, but we also want to make sure that we protect and give the...

When we look at the Income Assistance Program, the benefit levels are determined on a few factors in partnership with the NWT Bureau of Statistics, using information from the Northern Market Basket Measure, the NWT Community Price Survey, and the living cost differential. These are measures of costs of living in the Northwest Territories. We also use the Consumer Price Index, the Food Price Index, and the lowincome measure scale, which are nationally recognized models for determining income assistance rates. Those are what we are using for each of the communities in the NWT.