Alfred Moses

Thank you. I appreciate the Minister’s response. Obviously, when a family takes the responsibility to care for another family member’s children there is added stress and there’s added financial pressures that can’t be alleviated when sometimes it’s on the grandparents, who live on a pension. I mean, we can develop those policies, looking at those policies just specifically with people who are on a fixed income, such as grandparents. I mean, let’s start there because the grandparents are usually the ones that take care of their children’s children and there’s no financial benefit there.

Would...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to welcome Chief Herbert Blake, Inuvik Native Band, as well as His Worship Mayor Mark Heyck. Grant Gowans is up there. He’s a childhood friend of mine and we grew up together on the streets of Inuvik and I want to welcome him to the House today. As well, I’d like to recognize and welcome all the Anti-Poverty Working Group here and I just want to wish them the best of luck, and keep up the good work that they’re doing. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. You’ve heard a lot of comments already, so I’m just going to keep mine really general, not general but to the point and try to keep it short.

There are concerns in Inuvik. Anyone who has been up there and driven from the airport to the community of Inuvik, there are a lot of areas that still need some attending to. In some cases it can be pretty dangerous, depending on the speed that you’re driving.

I also believe the Minister is quite well aware of the runway issues we had and the sinkhole that appeared not too long ago. We need to address those and that whole system to...

Thank you. When we talk about these, I guess I wouldn’t call them deals, but these agreements between the parents and the siblings, sometimes there’s mediation in there and that mediation comes from the social services worker themselves to say our objective is to keep the child in the family and that mediation, when it happens and the grandparent or the family member accepts it, then they’re also accepting that there are no financial incentives to go along with that. Speaking of which, can I ask the Minister, what incentives are there out there to get our families in the Northwest Territories...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have some questions in follow-up to my Member’s statement today. As I mentioned, the government is doing a lot of good work in terms of supporting foster families and getting the programs in place to make sure that children in the NWT are given the proper services that they are entitled to. I just want to follow up with the Minister of Health and Social Services in terms of trying to educate residents of the Northwest Territories how this government can support them should they want to become a foster family in the community, or else if they want to take the options...

I know the collaboration between the departments of Health and Education Culture and Employment, and in the opening remarks it mentions that there is $511,000 for wage top-up and training to increase the program staff for licenced child care centres.

That got me thinking. I did have some discussions with an early childhood development specialist whose husband works up in Inuvik. We got to talking about these new initiatives and early childhood, and she mentioned that we need to have a specialist that can certify all these early childhood workers and currently we don’t have that. I want to ask...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize two Pages from Inuvik here today, Caitlyn Church and Ms. Olivia Inglangasuk, both of whose favourites sports are northern games. I asked them what did they like best about being here in the Legislative Assembly this week. They said it was fun and would definitely do it again. They also said you get to meet lots of people and all the important people, so I’m assuming that might be the Members. They also said that they get to go on TV a lot and you get free food. But most of all, they said they have a better understanding of how the government works...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Before I get into this motion specifically, the department and all Members of this Assembly have noticed that the Regular Members have introduced three motions particularly to this department. It’s not that we’re questioning their authority over what they’re doing, we just want to support the great things that are happening in education right now, early childhood development, child daycares and, in this case, the e-learning program.

We see what’s happening in the communities. We see how things are changing within the communities and throughout the Northwest Territories...

Thank you. I’m glad to hear that formula funding is something that’s going to be looked at and addressed. I think it’s long overdue because each authority only gets so many dollars to spend and when a lot of it goes into travel, that’s a lot taken out of the education components, the support components there.

Moving forward, one way that we can affect this is through a program that the Minister is very familiar with and that’s the e-learning program. I just wanted to make a little comment on the e-learning program. Committee has seen firsthand that program in action, seen the results that were...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. What I have here in my hands is the Early Childhood Development Framework of the Northwest Territories. In this framework we have seven commitments made by both the Department of Health and Social Services and Education, Culture and Employment. Within these seven commitments, we have 22 areas of action and underneath that, 39 deliverables and somewhere in the area of about 82 targets. I’m not sure if I counted them right. That’s just for this year alone, so moving forward I have a lot of questions about where we should be putting dollars.

When I look at these...