Caroline Cochrane

Attendance rates are a huge concern. I don't really have the answer to why they are not improving. Everybody, in my opinion, has been kind of blaming everybody else. Everyone is afraid of it. They are saying, "Is it the parents' responsibility? Is it the Aboriginal governments' responsibility? Is it the community's responsibility? Is it the teachers' responsibility?" Those questions are not okay for me.

I have actually brought it up at the Education Leaders, which has all of the chairs and the superintendents from all of the regions' 10 education boards, councils, authorities. I said this is an...

The Form F is actually a form that is signed to show either you have a status number, or if you're Metis, actually you're signed by your band or your Metis association. In fact, I don't see any reason why, once someone has been acknowledged as falling within the Form F that they have Indigenous rights based on being from the Territories, that we should be asking, so if we're doing that, I'm hoping it's a mistake. If we're doing that purposely, it should be fixed, and we will make sure that we look at that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

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.

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...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Fort Liard is now operational, with a licensed daycare provider. Tsiigehtchic was open for a total of one month and, at this moment, is having some internal issues, I would say. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Right at the current time, junior kindergarten and kindergarten are not compulsory. We need to be flexible with them, and I'm not sure if we want to actually broach on making them compulsory because we need the flexibility to be able to work with communities such as communities that have Aboriginal Head Start. I'm an advocate of Aboriginal Head Start. I think it's a great program. They've asked us to be flexible in the programming, so some programs like Fort Providence are not even doing their JK. Actually, they're doing just the Aboriginal Head Start. Other places are...