Bob McLeod

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to advise this House that the government has listened to the feedback we have received to date from Members about Junior Kindergarten.

In an effort to respond to what Members have told us, while at the same time not wanting to disrupt parents and schools that are in the midst of delivering Junior Kindergarten, we have made the following decision.

Without changing the current funding approach to Junior Kindergarten, it will be completely voluntary for any of the 23 communities now offering Junior Kindergarten to continue with the program this year. If they choose, they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I indicated in the letter, I said the funding model would remain the same for years one and two, which is 2015-16 and 2016-17. The reason for that is we have 23 communities that have implemented Junior Kindergarten. As the Members have requested that we review that immediately and so we have to determine how many of those will no longer participate in the Junior Kindergarten program. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As I explained to committee and as the Member will be very pleased to know, all of the members of the Intergovernmental Council are very committed to transparency and all of the intergovernmental leaders have agreed to make meeting outcomes available, and leaders also recognize the need to be open and transparent and available and open to the press, their constituents and their fellow leaders within their governments. As I offered, there are ways around this observer thing. All of the governments have agreed to limit their participation to three members at the council. As I suggested in the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I did bring forward a request from the MLAs to the Intergovernmental Council. I think it’s important to recognize that the Intergovernmental Council is intended to foster improved cooperation and collaboration on land and resource management issues, and each government will continue to represent its own interests and the independent jurisdictions of each government are untouched. So, ultimately, the accountabilities of each government must remain. So on this Intergovernmental Council there’s the Government of the Northwest Territories and at least seven Aboriginal...

As the Member indicates, the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement is administered by the federal government and, as I understand it, a component of this agreement relates to personal credits that individuals may be eligible to put towards educational, cultural projects, skills development or other related purposes. I think that we would want to see that information available to survivors, and the concern that has been raised by former eligible students that have not had adequate opportunity to apply to this program, so I would be pleased to include that in the request.

As a government, we just rolled out a number of policies. We came out with an Anti-Poverty Strategy where we provided $500,000 to address this. We are spending money on housing. We’re going to spend $21 million on housing over the next three years, and we continue to provide support in all of the 33 communities in the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think the last time I checked, this government spends about 70 percent of our budget on social programs. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Member wants to focus on Yellowknife, but all schools will see the re-profiling of existing funding. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We’re hearing that we have to adhere to our legislation. Obviously, as a government, we take that very seriously. We’ve indicated that we are doing a very comprehensive review and I think we would revisit it at that time. So we expect the review will take a period of time, but I’ve written to committee and indicated that we will seek input from every MLA on how this review should work, so that everybody will have input into it. Everybody, at the end of the day, will be happy with the outcome of the review. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Member knows, when the Program Review Office reviewed the education budgets, they determined the education system was over-funded by $17.5 million a year. The Yellowknife school boards had large, accumulated surpluses such as $2.5 million with YK1 and Yellowknife Catholic School Board had a $1.4 million surplus. So the funding model at this time that we put forward is it would not change for this year and next year. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.