R.J. Simpson

Thank you, Madam Chair. So I'll address a few things here.

So the relationship with the college board will be between the Minister and the chair, as the Member stated. The college is actually going to be more autonomous than education bodies so it's a bit of a different relationship, but that's how it will work.

We are looking at a new program, or exploring the possibility of a new program, to work with adults, you know, who they've gone through the JK to 12 system and maybe they don't have the skills that they need to move on to trades or postsecondary. And that is a that's a group a segment...

Thank you. It's not quite fully subscribed but it's not like there's no uptake at all. So we are getting close to the maximum there. Thank you.

Thank you. And as everyone's aware, over the past few years it's become very evident that, you know, the labour shortage that they've warned us about for years with Baby Boomers retiring, it's happening now. And we can no longer just continue doing the things the way we've done it for decades, really, because the market has changed so significantly. So we are looking at collecting data, looking at labour market trends, looking at demographics, so we can be creative, so we can get a handle on the situation and how we might be able to address it, so. Thank you.

Thank you. So the way that we are distributing that, we look at how many staff are required under the regulations in a child care facility. And based on how many staff are required, which is based on the number of children and the age of the children that that facility cares for, we provide funding for each of those employees that are required. This year the funding is about or it is $12,750 for each of those employees. And next year will be just over $16,000. And I say for each of those employees, but this actually goes to the provider itself. It goes to the operator themselves, and then...

Thank you. So if someone a senior needs assistance with their seniors home heating and they run out of their seniors home heating subsidy, they can always apply for income assistance and there's the chance that they're they could be topped off. I've seen that a number of times. As an MLA, I've had a number of constituents who they used all of their senior home heating subsidy and income assistance was able to provide them support. I've had as Minister, I've seen that come across my desk from every region in the territory and for the most part, they're always provided with support. We don't...

Thank you. And I did make a statement in the House here. There was not associated communications that came with that. Those will happen later in the year. I'll just tell you it shows me the value of our comms teams because, you know, I've said some I made a big announcement but we didn't have any associated communication materials coming out and no one knows about it outside of this room basically. So I just want to kudos to our comms team there.

But the program changes are significant. It's more than just, you know, changing some dollar amounts. There's a lot of regulatory changes that have...

Thank you. That number is relatively consistent because it is based on the school funding formula which is based on the number of students in the territory. And so that number hasn't varied greatly so that's why you see that consistency there. The Member is pointing out that, you know, there's often discussion about the need for more supports for inclusive schooling. And so the department is, early in the new government I understand, going be undertaking a review of their supports. You know, we've run into a number of issues. And as we face some of the labour market challenges and we can't get...

So I believe those are for the we have rolled out a child care fee reduction subsidy, and we provided child care operators with administrative funds so that they could hire administrative support to help them with some of that reporting. So that would account for those increases. Thank you.

Thank you. And yes, we did look at that initially. Again, as I told as I told the Member before, we shoot for the stars and we get chopped down at every juncture. So we still wound up with an excellent program but we couldn't get everything in this program that we wanted given our financial situation. But I think we wound up with I would say we already had we already currently have the best student financial assistance program in Canada, and we're just going to leave everyone in the dust come the next school year. Thank you.

Thank you. So when the money goes into the pot, that's the money we have. So it doesn't matter where it comes from. If it's from a carbon tax, if it's from, you know, permit fees or anything like that. So we look at what we have and what we can do with it. I have not instructed the department to spend their energy working on guaranteed basic income given that we are expending a lot of energy working on the income assistance program changes. I did try to take the approach of lessening the reducing the number of times that an individual might be cut off from income assistance. You know, as MLAs...