Charles Dent

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right; all income security programs will exempt the lump sum payments.

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The social assistance regulations require amendment in order to accommodate that. That amendment has not been completed yet, but work on rewriting the regulation is underway and will be done before the payments are issued.

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Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the federal government has the responsibility for the compensation payments and have set up the Indian Residential Schools Canada Secretariat to coordinate this program. So the GNWT is not directly involved in the lump sum payments, but the GNWT is working to provide files to the secretariat to allow for the verification of student attendance. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The current schedule would see the request for proposals going out by the end of this month, with our expectation that the award would take place shortly thereafter and construction hopefully starting by the end of August this summer.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t know specifically which policy the Member would be speaking of. I don’t believe that we have policies in place that are intended to harm our residents. I can say that while a regulation is in place, the Minister has no ability to overturn it, but a Minister can change a regulation. If regulations are brought to my attention that are causing problems with our residents or have unintended consequences, as soon as I am aware of that, I issue instructions that the regulations be reviewed and changed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have recently written the federal Minister to encourage him to appoint more citizenship court judges and particularly here in the Northwest Territories. I have asked that be done as soon as possible. I have not yet been able to confirm that we will not have a ceremony in the Territories this summer, but my office, when informed by the Member that this was likely, we started to follow up on that and we will pressure Citizenship and Immigration Canada to try and find a way to have citizenship court here this summer. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have probably the most generous Student Financial Assistance Program in Canada at this point. It is one that this Legislative Assembly has agreed we should invest in because of the importance of ensuring northern residents are well educated. It is a shared program. There is responsibility on students and their families to contribute as well. The expectation is, particularly for those who are going into programs like medicine or law, we know they are going to have tremendous earning power. It’s not that they are cut off from Student Financial Assistance; they can...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am a fan of life-long learning, so I enjoy seeing people getting back into school and continuing on with their education, but the simple fact is we don’t have unlimited funds. That was one of the reasons the limits were put there. Even if we were to take away the "in your lifetime" sentence, still right now we tie the amount of contributions to the years of schooling. So there is one semester of funding for every year of schooling, which means that maximum for somebody who has been schooled in the Northwest Territories for 12 years is 12 semesters, or typically to a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This being early in the fiscal year, I would expect that we haven’t used very much yet of our Student Financial Assistance allocation since the budget was only approved to be effective April 1st. Most of the money goes out in September for the rest of the year. We do typically use almost all of the Student Financial Assistance. In fact, many years we have gone over what we put in the budget and have had to reallocate from other budget line items or else come back to the Assembly for an increase in funding. This Assembly has never turned the department down when they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have recently written the federal Minister to encourage him to appoint more citizenship court judges and particularly here in the Northwest Territories. I have asked that be done as soon as possible. I have not yet been able to confirm that we will not have a ceremony in the Territories this summer, but my office, when informed by the Member that this was likely, we started to follow up on that and we will pressure Citizenship and Immigration Canada to try and find a way to have citizenship court here this summer. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right that I have written to the Minister’s office. We have had no response to that letter. So I can’t promise that we will get a response even if we follow up again. I will ensure that we are in contact with Minister Solberg’s office to let him know that it is important that we see access to citizenship courts here in the Northwest Territories and that we would like to see that take place very quickly. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.