Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I have a list of people I would like to recognize today. I would like to recognize Mr. Fraser Oliver and David Murphy from the Northwest Territories Teacher's Association. Thank you for being here.

The Native Women's Association, we have from the board of directors Ms. Liza Piper, the president; Mabel Brown; Rita Banksland; Cheryl Voytilla; Karen Caesar; Emma Amundson; Angela McKay; Jane Weyallon; Therese Villeneuve. From the staff of the Native Women's Association, we have Jennie Turner; Rachel Tambour-Zoe; Marie Speakman; Tina Hawker; Delilah Turner...

At this time, no, we are not supporting extra money for people to come in. I think it would be huge. It's a great idea. However, in honesty, it would be huge on daycares. That's based on my background with running daycares. It's that they use volunteers from all over the communities. It's powerful. The centre that I ran, they had speech pathologists coming in and, you know, people from Health and Social Services. We had elders coming in. We have parents coming in. If we started to support, it would be a matter of picking and choosing which ones get money and which ones don't. At this time, we...

At this time, no, we are not looking at a universal daycare program. I want to say that we actually have really subsidized, and I need to actually do some more work on the breakdown of how that looks like. We give money to the daycares directly to subsidize for it, so that they can have lower costs for children. That's based on if they are infants, or the age of the children. The younger the child, the more money daycare providers actually get. We give money to parents. If parents can't afford the daycare or subsidies or the daycare costs, they can come in if they are lower-income and actually...

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to recognize Ms. Arlene Hache, who is a good friend of mine and a mentor for many years, a lot of respect; and Ms. Katherine Underwood, who is here from Ryerson University. Welcome to the Leg.

Yes, absolutely. Actually, getting daycares into the communities is a priority. It's a mandate within this government, the 18th Legislative Assembly. We have 11 communities that don't have daycares, although we are working with a couple of them. Some of them aren't in the Member's ridings. Yes, we have regional coordinators who will go in and support anyone in the communities who is looking up to open up a daycare. We have start-up money. We have health and safety money.

Like I have said, we provide subsidies for the daycares directly. There's a lot of support. We need daycares. There's lot of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, the Canada and Northwest Territories Early Learning and Childcare Bilateral Agreement was signed. Within that agreement, it's not really designated for communities as much, but within the terms of early childhood development where they have extra money to top up our money, we will be using that for providing things like we are doing ECD, or early childhood development. There used to be a certificate program. We are now doing a diploma program with Aurora College. We have increased our scholarships for people trying to get into early childhood development. It used...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The territorial-wide vision is actually a political decision that will be made, but it's really important; we actually want the associate deputy minister of post-secondary renewal to be with us during that process because that person has to understand really clearly what the vision is, because the next step from that is to be able to do the post-secondary vision based off of the territorial vision. So it's a political decision, but that person will be helping to facilitate it.

Mr. Speaker, our cultures and languages are the foundation of our work in Education, Culture and Employment. When our languages and cultures are strong, our people are strong and our work is much more successful. I am pleased to report that we are seeing progress in our efforts to retain, preserve, and promote Northwest Territories languages and cultures.

We are currently finalizing a multi-year action plan as a companion piece to the Strong Cultures, Strong Territory Framework. The action plan contains 25 categories of actions needed to ensure the Government of the Northwest Territories is...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. When this was first brought to us as Members of the Legislative Assembly, I did talk a little bit more to the Member from Kam Lake, who was bringing this forward. At that time, my biggest concern was around the money. Within this, what will be coming up later, is that introducing that, if this goes through, that there would be an extra $30,000 that can be utilized a year before the election or during the year of the election. I have always been about fairness and I have tried to maintain that fairness throughout all of my work here at the Legislative Assembly. This doesn...

The act does state that we have to have an administrator in place, so that position will stay until we get the new advisory committee initiated. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.