Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are just in the process, actually, of doing a review of our education renewal, all of the initiatives, but I can talk about a few that have been successful, not based on statistics, but just on what we are seeing.

Our Northern Distance Learning, huge success. Again, I don't have the stats to show that. We are just reviewing it now. I will use Ulukhaktok as one of my examples. I know there are other communities. Three students who graduated from Grade 12 in that community who would have normally had to take upgrading have now got the credentials that they can actually...

Yes, we will absolutely look at our policy and add the minimum amount, because, in some cases, people might even qualify. If we don't have that in, we should have that in, so I will commit to actually having that information in our policy.

Mr. Speaker, I give notice that, on Tuesday, June 4, 2019, I will move that Bill 57: An Act to Amend the Employment Standards Act be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We've often heard it all along saying, "we need to get this right." With that polytechnic, we need to get this right. This isn't going to be something that's done too fast. The first thing was developing our vision, trying to find out what are our strengths; what programs should be done. One of the critiques that was in our college foundational report is we tried to do too much for everyone. Sometimes, when you try to do too much, like over 200 mandate question areas, you don't get enough done to address them all. You get spread too thin. We are trying to figure out what our specialization...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As for the term "lobbying," direct lobbying to build our polytechnic university, at this point, we have not. I know that the federal government is working with us. They just gave us $4 million, I believe, for the Centre for Mining and Industry in Fort Smith that was recently opened, which I attended just a couple of months ago. Word on the street is that they are actually looking at post-secondary universities in the north all over, so we are trying to get in on that team to find out what they are doing and what their interests are. Once we have an implementation plan...

When I was travelling to the three communities three or four times, I had heard from staff and from students, et cetera, that they want to have great programming and that we need to have programming for northern students. People were a little bit concerned about national and international students, but it's a good thing. The reality is that our numbers in the Northwest Territories will make it challenging if we didn't look outside of the Northwest Territories.

I want to emphasize, the post-secondary that we provided in the Northwest Territories has to be for northern people based on Northern...

Yes. Actually, we're going to be presenting to standing committee as well on June 5th, so I'm going to give a little bit of heads up to what we're presenting on June 5th, I suppose. We've completed the survey. We've gone across the Northwest Territories. We've reached actually almost 750 surveys. I don't have the number on hand. We'll present it to standing committee. We did a real focus on youth, 29 and under, which I'm very happy to report that we've actually been very successful in getting those voices. With that, we're still breaking down what the vision will be. That process is still...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I know that I am breaking convention a little bit because I don't really have a constituent, but I do want to recognize the women who are in the House today who are watching the proceedings. I think it is pretty evident that there are not enough women in the House, and so I am really proud to see them and, like my colleague, I am hoping that I will see their names on ballots. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. No child who is enroled in junior kindergarten or kindergarten is it compulsory that they attend. It's an optional programming, both of them. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are a number of issues that affect bringing licensed childcare into communities. We don't keep records of unlicensed childcare, so I have to state that. There are a lot of communities that use their aunties, grandmothers, et cetera. Those ones, we don't record. There are two that I can think of right now, Fort Liard and Tsiigehtchic, came on. Sometimes, you get a licensed childcare centre, and then they don't get the staff properly. There were some internal issues with the community, family issues with communities. Sometimes, they fall apart. The reality is, in...