Robert Bouchard

Premier McLeod, please reintroduce your witnesses.

Thank you, Mr. Fulford. Committee, we are on Bill 15, general comments. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Premier McLeod.

We’ll go in groups of 25 clauses, if committee agrees.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my experience, nothing is free in this world. The point is that the funding for the junior kindergarten is going to be from within and now it’s affecting other organizations, other communities that have Head Start programs. My concern is that these Head Start programs and other organizations will fail. I’m just wondering: Has the department completely assessed this in their plan to launch junior kindergarten both in the small communities and in the larger centres?

I guess the issue is if those organizations don’t have four-year-olds, are they funded per capita or per student? How will they continue to exist? Will the enrolments be so declined that they will not be able to operate? Has the department looked at that enrolment and do they fund per student?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was able to go back to Hay River this weekend and saw that there were biathletes training in Hay River for the Arctic Winter Games. Today I thought I’d recognize all those athletes out there practicing and training throughout the Northwest Territories for the Arctic Winter Games next week.

I’d like to commend all those people that have helped them, the coaches, their parents. I look forward to being at the Arctic Winter Games next week. We have 35 athletes and six coaches from Hay River ourselves, and many of their parents are travelling to Fairbanks, Alaska, to be...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to thank my colleagues, Mrs. Groenewegen and Mr. Miltenberger, for bringing forward this motion. They were the mover and seconder of this motion, but we did discuss this topic in Caucus several times and it has been done with heavy heart and consideration of a whole bunch of different issues.

I will not be supporting the motion because I feel that it’s not something we should be doing. I went home, talked to my constituents and a bunch of them had concerns and issues with it. The other thing is that as a member of the Board of Management here in the...

I appreciate that they would have to do this, but what is the mechanism that the government uses to make sure that this is being done? Obviously, we’re hearing those concerns in our community and it’s not being fulfilled. The territorial NGOs that have agents in Hay River are not being represented.

What is the government doing to make sure that these mandates are being fulfilled?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to ask some questions to the Premier about the NGO. It looks like he was very well versed in the NGO field today and I had some questions about he talked about the mandates of NGOs and that they don’t look at that.

I’m wondering, because I’ve heard some concerns from the Hay River NGOs that are in that area, that the territorial NGOs that are set up and established in Yellowknife are not providing funding out into the regions.

Can the Minister please provide me some direction on how those NGOs’ mandates are looked at, and if they’re providing a territorial...