R.J. Simpson

ECE provides funding to all the education bodies in the Northwest Territories based on the School Funding Framework, and that, essentially, is based on the number of students who are enrolled. Then once the regional education body receives that funding, it allocates it to individual schools. It is the principals of those schools who determine how that funding is best used. When there are declining enrollments, that means there is less money. That means there are fewer teachers.

This is something that was discussed at length in the last Assembly, and I know that there were comments made that we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can inform the Member, my colleague, that the education renewal and innovation framework was shared widely with all the education bodies back in 2013 when it was first released. The Member referenced a three-year action plan in his statement. I am not sure if that was. It is my assumption it was, but I can't say for sure. I can find out.

However, this leads me to something else that I have been discovering since I took this portfolio. The communication between the department and the education bodies, the boards themselves and the regional councils, needs to be improved...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are dealing with the indemnity payable to officeholders, and I see that there is a bit of a difference here. The rules and procedures committee was identified in the current act as receiving a lesser indemnity than the other committee chairs. My understanding is that is because, traditionally, there were only about 12 or 13 meetings an Assembly for the rules committee. I understand that, in the last Assembly, that number has increased. Do we expect these numbers to increase, the workload to increase, to be similar to the other committees? Is that why this increase is...

Even though YK1 owns the infrastructure, the GNWT is responsible for new schools and major retrofits, so, if there is something that can't be covered with the $900,000 capital surplus, like a brand new school, that is what the GNWT covers.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Unlike most jurisdictions in the Northwest Territories, most communities, the school infrastructure of YK1 is owned by YK1, for the most part. As such, it is not the GNWT that provides maintenance; it is actually YK1. The GNWT does provide a maintenance budget. I believe it is $1.4 million annually to YK1 to perform this type of maintenance.

Sometimes, when ECE has extra money in its budget, in its capital budget, it will provide that to cover some of these costs, but at this time ECE doesn't have that extra money in its capital budget and the YK1 actually has a surplus...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank my colleague for his earlier statement, as well as the other colleague from the Deh Cho. I appreciate these conversations coming to light. We need to talk about them if we want to make changes.

The Member is right. Small communities have lower graduation rates. They have lower attendance rates. One of the priorities of this Assembly is to increase student education outcomes to the rest of Canada. In some regional centres and in Yellowknife, the student outcomes are nearly the same as the rest of Canada, so it really is the small communities, in a lot of...

There are two parts to the question: will the Minster commit to delivering on the ERI, and will the departmental staff go into all the small communities? The original ERI framework had a lot of big goals in there. I actually respect that document quite a bit because it says, "This is what we are going to try. We might not try them all. We are going to try them, and we will see if they work." They threw ideas out there.

It is a great document, and a lot of good things have come out of that. We have northern distance learning. There are elders in school. There are all sorts of these things that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The transformation of Aurora College into a polytechnic university is a priority of this Legislative Assembly, and I am pleased to say that we continue to make progress. To be successful, we must focus investments in programs and services that lead to better education and employment outcomes for our residents, including through our post-secondary education system.

Mr. Speaker, success requires the right changes, in the right order, at the right time. Following from the government response to the Aurora College foundational review, one of those changes has been the recent...

Thank you. I look forward to seeing if that happens, but it's a little strange, I guess, that, after one Assembly, we give this increase. Usually, you know, if we're budgeting, you might have to have a few years' overages before you work that into the base, so I look forward to seeing the work that this committee does in this Assembly. Thank you.

No, I am brand new in the job, and I plan on reviewing all the budgets that ECE has, to make sure that we are doing things properly.

ECE and YK1 have also been in talks about maintenance plans. The Department has offered to assist YK1. You know, we have the Department of Infrastructure here that specializes in this kind of stuff, and so the GNWT is offering assistance to help develop a maintenance plan so that some of these maintenance costs can be dealt with in a more timely fashion perhaps, or at least there could be a plan in place to avoid some of these emergency expenditures like the...