Wendy Bisaro

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are addressed to the Minister of Transportation. I would like to follow up on my statement with regards to my take on the bridge. I have some questions for the Minister relative to the monitoring of the project by the GNWT. Since the concession agreement was signed, from the time the concession agreement was signed until the end of last summer when I believe the government took a greater interest in the management of the project, I would like to know from the Minister what kind of monitoring of the Deh Cho Bridge Project and of the Deh Cho Bridge...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Some years ago the government introduced an Inclusive Schooling Policy. Over the years it’s become accepted practice for our schools to include every child in the classroom, no matter their mental or physical capability. Students in our schools who are special needs students range from those with minimal needs to those with very severe needs. Of these, according to a Canadian average, about 5 percent of these have severe needs for many different reasons. These children cannot manage in a classroom on their own and require a full-time aide to assist them every moment...

Thanks to the Minister. The document that I’m looking at showed only 300 vacancies in the Territory. So if it’s gone up to 500 across the Territory, that’s not good. Yellowknife has gone a bit, but the whole Territory has gone up a lot. So that’s not progress, in my mind.

I had one other question. The corporation was working with local housing organizations to provide them with some training and to provide them with some assistance in terms of operating more efficiently and collecting more of their arrears and they’re working on rent collections and so on and I just wondered, you know, as to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I wanted to ask a question here. A while ago we were given some information with regard to, well, actually it’s a tabled document; Public Housing Vacancy Status. I noted in Yellowknife we have a wait list of, actually, this is February 15, 2009, there are 141 people or families waiting for a unit within a total complement of 293 public housing units. That’s 150 percent units are required or 50 percent of the possible units are on a wait list. I just wondered from a corporation perspective what they can do to assist the Yellowknife Housing Authority to try and...

So to put words in the Minister’s mouth, there is going to be money available if people need it. I’m just kidding.

The other question I had related to arrears and debts and mortgage collections by housing authorities, we discussed this, as well, at business plan time. We were advised that things were improving at that point. The corporation is giving a certain amount of leeway to the local housing organizations and letting them collect as much as possible and then things get turned over to the corporation to kind of go a little further. I’m just wondering if I can get an update from the...

Thanks to the Minister for that. I guess it begs the question, what activities are ongoing to create housing for staff in small communities?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To the Minister, I appreciate that the department is willing to do this in house and that the superintendents and chairs are providing information, but if I were chair of a board, it would certainly be to my advantage to pad my numbers and to indicate that special needs students who aren’t severe may be severe and that’s why I’m suggesting that there needs to be an impartial person doing this gathering. So to the Minister, I’m not suggesting a study. Again, would he commit to having an impartial, outsider gather this data? Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister. My point is not so much that enrolments are going down and it’s not so much that we necessarily have to increase funding. I don’t think that’s what perhaps the districts are asking for, but there is an unequal distribution of very severely high needs, very severely special needs students within districts and the allocation of students is not even across the board. My point is, then, I think the point of YK1 is that the funding needs to be reallocated and redistributed so that severely impacted special needs students, the higher number in districts get more funding. I...

Or is this perhaps a trend all NWT education authorities are experiencing? The only way to know for sure, Mr. Speaker, is to undertake an independent count of the severe needs students in NWT schools. It is highly unlikely there will be an even distribution amongst all schools, but that’s what the current funding formula assumes.

Boards with a higher incidence of severely disabled students must be funded to a higher level, Mr. Speaker. ECE needs to reconsider how education authorities are funded under the Inclusive Schooling Policy. Thank you.

Thanks for the updated number, but that’s still one-third more units required than what we have space for. I’m sure that’s not what we’re building. I appreciate that things can’t be done totally, but from a corporation perspective is there any reason why we have so many people on the waiting list? Is it just that, do all of these people qualify? I presume they do. Do we have that many people requiring housing in Yellowknife? Even out of the total units in the Territory, it’s like some 2,300 units and 110 of them or so are here in Yellowknife. That’s still a pretty huge number. Is there any...