Michael McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister makes a good point as we want to keep our students going to school in the North, but the high cost of living…It only makes sense that you may want to go to school south. Mr. Speaker, they are doing an income support redesign to reflect the high cost of living in some of the communities. Will they do the same thing with the Student Financial Assistance Program and have it implemented this fall? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I certainly will continue to pursue this. It’s not something that we have as a high priority right now. There is still a lot of communication equipment and communication issues in our communities that we could focus on. There’s the issue of self-service, and self-service along the highway would maybe make more sense right now than implementing a huge, costly 911 service that is only going to serve a small part of the whole Northwest Territories. It’s something we’d have to sit down and talk with the other departments and the other agencies, but we’ll certainly follow up...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have the detail and the cost for breaking it out per community. We could, I guess, look at that. There’s a number of things that would come forward as one-time costs from the RCMP and also NorthwesTel or the provider and others. So we’d have to sit down and break all those numbers out. We haven’t looked at specifically providing it for one community. There’s still a cost factor. In fact, Yellowknife has made application to CRTC for some money and were turned down as this didn’t meet the program criteria. If there’s an interest, we certainly can sit down and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Of course, we will agree particularly with the Member’s comments. I will forward them on to the committee for consideration. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, tires have been raised as one of the considerations that we have to look at. We are also working with communities to look at mobile equipment. We recently had a number of workshops and had some companies from Alberta come and talk about being able to recycle some of the scrap metals. As part of those discussions, several communities got together and are exploring the different ways they can deal with the bulkier products in their landfill, such as tires and mobile tire shredding is something we are considering. We are also going to be working with...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, within the next few weeks we’ll have high school students graduating from Grade 12. The past couple weeks we’ve had Aurora College convocations, and we’ve got some students graduating from southern institutions. First, I want to congratulate all these grads and wish them nothing but the best in their future goals.

We continue, Mr. Speaker, to have one of the best systems for post-secondary education in the country, but there still needs to be some work done on the Student Financial Assistance Program. Imagine how many more students, Mr. Speaker, we may be...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The New Deal initiative has been undertaken and it’s all been handled with funding from within up until now. We have never requested any additional resources to implement this whole initiative. Things have been going very well. However, it’s taken up the dedication from a lot of our staff people. There are a number of projects that have been deferred and delayed because of that. The trans fund didn’t move forward as fast as we would like it to happen because we needed the resources to work on a New Deal. That’s the same with the discussion paper on the Planning Act...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to advise my colleagues that on May 15th, the Minister of Health and Social Service and the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment will join me in the Great Hall of the Legislative Assembly to launch the 2007 Get Active NWT summer campaign.

The 2007 Get Active event is a friendly challenge to residents of the Northwest Territories to register the time they spend being physically active for a chance to win a $5,000 grant to support their community recreation program, a $500 grant for the most active groups and airline tickets to Edmonton.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to close with the fact that none of us on this side of House is questioning the importance of all the work that these folks out there do. None of us would ever do that. In my particular case, I try to make sure as much funds as possible reach the people on the front line because they are the ones that are providing the service. I have had the opportunity to deal with a few of them. I know some of the stresses that they are under. A lot of it is financially related. So that is the point in my asking the questions on these particular issues, Madam Chair...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have done some researching, too. Students say it does cost less to go to school south than it does in Inuvik. That is all the research you need, is what they tell us and that is what we should be listening to. The $1,925 per semester, is that figure also going to be adjusted when they redo their rates? The cost of tuition in some of the institutions is going up but I don’t know if our rates have increased at all, so I would like to ask the Minister if that cost will be increasing also. Thank you.