Jackson Lafferty

Mahsi. The process itself is working closely with the school boards, the school board council and the district level as well, because we provide funding to the organization to provide the operation and maintenance of the school and to deal with the students. Enrolment issues are becoming an issue, but at the same time we have provided funding just in the last several months, now we’re seeing some results, but it’s going to take some time, but we are progressing on the enrolment issue.

So, Mr. Speaker, that’s great news. Even though it’s just a short period since September, we are seeing...

I think the importance is the service delivery, that we do provide subsidies to all Northwest Territories, whether it be one-stop, two-stop, three-stop shop. It’s a core service delivery that we deliver to the communities. So whether the Member is talking about all these shops, we do have a GNWT shop that we have to provide subsidies to the Northwest Territories on core delivery. Mahsi.

When we first hired the consultants to do a thorough review of the program that we delivered since the transfer of the program in 2006 we just wanted to capture what we’ve done to date and where we can go from here, what worked, what didn’t work, the causes of it. That is the review that has been undertaken. The report is finalized. The actual cost itself I will need to get back to the Member or Members on that. We’re still working out the logistics of it and there is an error in the report itself. So we’ve gone back to the consultant to provide more detailed information in that respect.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. [English translation not provided.]

With the recent tragedy in Haiti, the country that is in great need of help and assistance, to start developing their country over again, a small community in the Northwest Territories has the intention to help. The community of Behchoko, under the spearhead of Michael Botermans and the youth, came up with an idea of how to fully utilize a penny to start developing the country of Haiti over again.

The community initiated a penny drive where kids, community members, elders, leaders, and everyone picked pennies up from the ground, dug into...

We did make some changes to our program back in 2007. We did a review of our programming. We have made some drastic changes from increasing benefits to Northwest Territories. Also, just adding $5.1 million into the program itself. Those are substantial changes. We continue to work with the unearned and earned income. We do provide various training programs as well for those individuals that would like to get off income support, a Productive Choices program, but we continue to create these programs so those individuals can work with us. Mr. Speaker, we will continue to provide that valuable...

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we do have people in the regions that deal with clientele. Yes, we deal with a computer system, but that’s just one piece of it. We continue to train our staff that they can have PR training into the communities, public relations. I think that’s the key. We have client service officers in most of the communities. For those without client service officers, we have dedicated individuals who go to the communities to deal with clientele. So there has been constant training that’s happening within our department. We will continue to provide those services, Mr...

The overall plan will be in these coming months. What I’ve highlighted is we’re currently working closely with the school boards themselves, the literacy councils in the communities. Also just dealing with the enrolment issue. The Member is right; that is one of the top priorities within our Education department. If a student misses one day a week, it adds up to almost a year by the time they reach grade 10. A year of schooling is a lot. So those are the topics of discussion that we’re having with the experts around the table, the committee members. They’re the ones that are the experts at the...

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Member for asking that question. I think it’s important to highlight that initiative that we’ve undertaken, the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative. We were given indication last year sometime that enrolment was down and there were challenges with identifying students, where they’re at with their grades and so forth. So, Mr. Speaker, that area has been identified and we have a committee that’s in place that had several meetings already and they’ve made recommendations to our department.

On providing additional funding to the school boards...

There were no problems. There were challenges that were before us. We worked with those challenges. We continued to improve the program where we met some challenges and we continued to improve in those areas. Right now we’re talking about transferring. I think we’re at that stage where we will be providing more information to the standing committee on a going forward basis on the detailed information. But we faced some challenges. We resolved those challenges, and we continue to improve our program. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. Just for the record, it’s not 14 positions that were transferred. When the transfer occurred in 2006 it was $1.3 million, not $1.5 million. That consisted within that of 10.75 PYs, not 14 positions. I just want to make that clear. But this is still in the planning stages. We just announced within the budget announcement that these programs would be transferred back to the Housing Corporation. Those logistics, the details of it need to be worked out still. We’re in the planning stages. We will be consulting with the standing committees on a going forward basis. We need to...