Thank you. Thank you, Member for Range Lake.
Thank you. So is that policy, then? Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. No, it does not exist in policy. Thank you.
Member for Range Lake.
Thank you. So if in this current intake for the 90 -- the 90 spots, if there's 200 applications or 500 applications or whatever it may be -- because there's going to be more than available spots. That's the predicament we find ourselves in. If there's a change in quota, are we going to do the same thing where people who apply to this intake are held over in case there's an expansion of quota in the future? Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, knowing what we know now, I am not making any commitments for 2026. What we did when we paused the reopening of the program in January of this year was we actually went and we sat down with stakeholders before we relaunched the program under new expectations and new parameters. So the work that we're going to do this year in 2025 is sit down with our stakeholders and determine what the program is going to look like in 2026. And so before we've had the opportunity to do that, I won't be making any commitments as to what 2026 will look like. We will need to make sure that we are prepared based on allocations right now and based on potential changes that a future or existing federal government could come forward with. Unfortunately, as far as allocation numbers are concerned, we really are at the mercy of the decisions of the federal government. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Range Lake.
Thank you. And I acknowledge that, and it is a decision that was made unilaterally and has earned the ire of many provincial governments and territorial governments. But, you know, one of the problems we have is that we have -- we only have just hit our quota whereas the Yukon has been hitting -- has made good use of that quota over time, and before they -- they're cut down to 400, but they were operating at 800. So the Maritimes have a different system where they pool their allocation. I think it's around 5,000 applications that's split between all the provinces. Is there a -- so there's different models, I guess, is what I'm getting at and ways to advance this issue together. I fear that if we just stay in our kind of box and just play with the numbers we have, we're not really going to change anything even if there's a more willing partner in Ottawa. So is the Minister prepared to work with Yukon and Nunavut to -- or with internal resources, but just we need something new, we need a new take on this, and to continue putting that pressure on the federal government to give us those quotas back. But can we pool our strength with the other northern territories in particular and get a deal like they have in the Maritimes or the Atlantic provinces? Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. So, Madam Chair, the Yukon was able to move their nominee program up to 430 allocations in previous years. This year, because they were cut by 50 percent, they went down to 215. So that said, they are still starting from a place that was greater than our allocation but not as high as the Member indicated.
It's worth noting, Madam Chair, that different territories are in different positions as far as nominee programs are concerned. Right now, Nunavut does not have a nominee program. That being said, I hear the Member, and I'm certainly always willing to work pan-territorially. I have a wonderful working relationship with Minister Pillai on this -- or Premier Pillai on this file and have had the opportunity to speak with him, and he has certainly granted me time to speak with me on this which I very much appreciate the camaraderie between the three territories, and certainly, I'm happy to extend that conversation to this file here.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Range Lake.
Yeah, thank you for the clarification. I don't know why I had the 800 in my mind. But that's good to hear. I think the fact that Nunavut doesn't have one is the reason why we should be leading this conversation because, you know, if they don't need the quota right now -- clearly they don't -- then we could make use of theirs until they're at a time to be ready. So I really encourage the Minister to have more than a conversation, put a plan together, and really aggressively lobby, and lean on the provinces too because, you know, here's a secret. The provinces understand the territories are different than the provinces and are very willing to support us in our specific needs, and I think they will buy into this approach, especially if we broaden the conversation into Arctic sovereignty as well. So I strongly encourage the Minister to put a plan together, or at least a concept together, that can be shared with Premier Pillai, and I'm not sure who the Minister responsible is in Nunavut as well, but build a coalition and find a number that works for all three territories that we can share and bring that to the desk of the Minister of citizenship and refugees. Thank you -- to immigration and refugees. Thank you.
Thank you. Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Certainly, I will continue my advocacy, and I appreciate the amount that this topic has come up on the floor. I certainly talked about it frequently in the last term, and I'm happy to continue the honour of being able to work on it on this side. So thank you.
Thank you. Next, I have the Member for Frame Lake.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Just give me a sec here to find -- okay. Yeah, I just wanted to note that there doesn't appear to be any substantial growth in this area of the budget, the labour development and standards area generally. However, a number of goals in the business plan, and certainly the mandate of this government, speaks to increasing workforce, and I could go through the process of listing off a bunch but I'll ask questions about business planning in a sec.
Can I just ask the high level question first, you know, how is this division supporting the priorities of this mandate particularly in supporting labour market training and development efforts and, indeed, growing the workforce of the Northwest Territories? If we're not kind of giving further resources to this department, how are we expecting them to achieve kind of better results or the increased goals that are listed throughout the business plan? Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I'll start, and then would -- I'm sure the Members would love to also get to hear somebody else talk at this table as well, and I'll pass to deputy minister Fulford who I know has wonderful things to say.
So to start, some of the things that we are doing have to do -- you know, for example, in this section, we have apprenticeship allocation certification. We also have our labour market programs. And unfortunately, while we did see that the federal government did not reinstate our labour market programs across the country, we saw a $625 million dip in that funding across the country. We were still able to hang on largely to what we were able to do in this section even without that because, as the Member said, this is an incredibly important section. So as one of the key things that we've done that I love to be able to talk about is really broaden the access points for access to entry into the trades. So it used to be that you had to graduate from high school, for example, with certain courses and have certain marks in them, and one of the things that we've done is open up another route which says if you have graduated from high school in the Northwest Territories, you can enter into an apprenticeship.
Some of the other pieces that we've done are really going out and trying to bring together, you know, the programs that we have within education, culture and employment and the residents that are trying to access them, so certainly working with our dev corps who are putting together their own training and workforce development tools as well, and then we also have our Skills 4 Success. And with that, Madam Chair, I would love to pass to the deputy minister who can speak in greater detail.
Thank you. Deputy minister.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't have a lot to add to that but I would -- I would also highlight the increase to the small community employment support budget that was voted last year by the Members and has resulted in a change to the program to focus more on the employment -- state of employment in the NWT small communities which is where the problem is most acute. So that additional million dollars is being flowed to programs that support the labour market in those small communities. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Frame Lake.
Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for those answers. So maybe I'll turn to some of the targets in the business plan. And just want to say, you know, I do appreciate that they've established targets. This is something that I raised during the last review. I guess my comment now is, you know, the targets are still -- I guess vague isn't the right word. But I'll give an example.
So our target for implementation of the post -- for post-secondary is to increase post-secondary students from 569. So having a target like that means that we will achieve our goal if we have 570 students in post-secondary. So we've increased it by one; therefore, it's been increased. So I guess the comment I would make is it's great to establish a target of increasing students, increasing post-secondary students. We've got increased students in occupational demand training. In every case, the targets in this area of the business plan, which is growing and enhancing the northern workforce, the target is to grow it but we don't know how much or how it's going to happen.
There's so many of these, I don't think I can possibly get into all of them with the five minutes I have left. So I guess the question would be does the department plan to establish more specific targets for each of these line items and come forward with plans for actioning all of them? And if not in the business plan, where can MLAs look to find kind of what the department is hoping to achieve by 2027? Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I certainly want us as a territory to be very ambitious and to -- I'd love to see us set targets we know we can't meet and, you know -- that sounds silly, but in the sense that I always want us to be wanting more and wanting to grow bigger and wanting to achieve greater things as a territory together. That said, I know that there is -- we also want to be able to ensure that our goals and our targets are within reach. And so as a Minister, I don't want us to see 570 here and then pat ourselves on the back. As a Minister, I want us to see marketable change in these outcomes. I want -- you know, I want, for example, the MLA for Mackenzie Delta to feel at the end of this Assembly, like, together we have achieved something. I want, you know, the Member for the Sahtu who comes and talks to me quite frequently about trades training to feel that we've made significant differences in his region. And I think that that is important.
At this point in time, I will say to the Member I don't have a goal to sit and identify and strategize because what I would rather see staff doing is actually going out and making a difference in the lives of students. I want those career and education advisors not talking about in a strategy about what they do an a daily basis but doing those things. So it's -- I hear the Member. I hear the desire for documents like that. We do have our Skills 4 Success document that we continue to work towards and strategies like that, but I don't want to create new ones. I want staff out there working with residents and with Northerners. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Frame Lake.
Thank you, Madam Chair. And, I mean, I guess what I would say in response to that is that the difficulty is -- I'm not necessarily looking for documents per se. I don't think that staff time is necessarily best spent kind of just producing plans and reports all the time, but the problem is that if we don't know what we're trying to achieve, it's very hard to define for the people trying to achieve it what success is going to look like and what they should be working towards. So I guess I've got to come up with some Member's statements to talk about this a bit more because -- but the bottom line is is that, you know, if we're just looking to increase post-secondary students but we don't really know what that's going to look like, how -- it's very difficult for me to understand how we have kind of a concerted plan. Or have we even gone about the work of trying to identify, you know, what are the problems that we're trying to solve, what is the -- what are the main barriers to workforce development in the territory and what do we need to do in order to kind of remove those barriers and increase the workforce and what does success look like. I do think that it's important to define that.
So maybe the Minister can or her staff can kind of help me better understand it because I think that there probably are answers to these questions out there. They don't necessarily have to take the form of a plan, but I do want to know that we know exactly -- that we have a good idea of what we're trying to achieve with any given program. And better yet, that we're even measuring the success of that program so we can determine if we're achieving it. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. And, Madam Chair, I think it's worth saying that one of the things that I really like about this Assembly is that we're using our business plans more as living documents and reevaluating them year after year. And so certainly, you know, as the Member stated that he had pointed out last year wanting to see targets added in, the comments of the Member are certainly being taken into account here today.
In regards to the number itself and what the goal is, certainly at face value here the number is to see more students accessing post-secondary. I think what you might run into is nuances and differences in that and how each of us even interprets that. One could say that you have students who, you know, had already used up their Student Financial Assistance and now we know that Indigenous students have unlimited Student Financial Assistance. So you could have situations where it's the same students who are going back to school now that they have more access. It doesn't necessarily mean that these are new students to post-secondary education at the end of the day. And even that there has a difference and nuance and a difference in how -- it tells a different story at the end of the day. But at face value here, our goal is to see more students partaking in post-secondary education or more post-secondary education being taken at the end of the day.
I'm certainly happy to continue to, you know, adjust this as we go and certainly interested to be more specific as long as we're still working towards that goal of increasing the number of students in post-secondary at the end of the day. Thank you.
Thank you. Next I'll go to the Member for Yellowknife Centre.
I will go to the Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Madam Chair. So I wanted to first zero in on the labour market programs, and looking at the goal that has been set out in the business plan to increase -- let me just bring up the business plan -- to maintain or increase the uptake. And so I notice that so far between 2022-2023 and then the following year 2023-2024, in fact there was a decrease in the number of clients and the number of employers that were participating in the labour market programs. Fairly significant, so from 188 to 156 clients in 2023-2024, and then from 71 to 63 employers. I also note that there was a significant drop in funding between those two years, and we're maintaining that lower level of funding. Like, what is the department's plan to actually try to raise those numbers if we're actually seeing a drop so far? Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, if I can say to Members, if they want me to follow along in the business plan, it would be helpful if they gave me a page number.
So in regards to the changes in the labour development and standards section, we've gone from 2024-2025 Main Estimates of $17 million, and now we're sitting at 2025-2026 Main Estimates of $18.9 million. And so if the Member is wanting me to reference a different section, very, very happy to speak to specific sections and what the changes might be.
As far as changes in number of employers itself, I guess in that case would venture to pass to assistant deputy -- no? I am going to say that at the end of the day, I don't have the data that would show, you know, on hand right now, who those employers are and kind of what that would look like. There's certainly going to be fluctuations year over year, and our staff are going to continue to work with residents in order to increase, first of all, through my ITI hat, the number of self-employed persons that we have across the territory. And then with my ECE hat back on, certainly working to make sure that we are supporting employers to grow, that we are supporting them to access wage subsidies so that they can take on more staff, do more training. And the addition of that is I will say in conversations about this in other circles that there are also businesses currently being purchased by larger conglomerates. And so, you know, where we've got joint ventures or we've got, you know, the purchase of different businesses. This has even happened in Kam Lake by Indigenous governments or by dev corps themselves. And so the differences in our number of businesses, while there are businesses that have certainly closed in the territory, some of them are businesses purchasing other businesses, but I don't have that level of detail in front of me here to say what exactly I'm pointing at here. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Madam Chair. And so the page in the business plan I was looking at is page 18, in case that helps. But I'll -- I mean, on a related topic, you know, in the budget there's -- we've got the trades and occupations wage subsidy that's the same as last year, so $922,000. Is this fully subscribed? So those are grants to provide financial assistance to employers to hire Northerners and support that individual if they get apprenticeship or occupation certification. Can the Minister tell us whether that's fully subscribed and is there more demand for this program than we can offer with the $922,000 that's allocated to it? Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister for Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I can say in previous years, these programs all have not been fully subscribed. One of the goals that I certainly have is I want to see them fully subscribed. I want to see them in communities doing the good work of supporting employers to hire people to do the training, to purchase equipment they need to purchase in order to support somebody's learning and experience on the job. And so certainly a goal of mine is to see these programs absolutely fully subscribed across the territory. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Madam Chair. And so just to confirm, so the next one down the list, the workforce development agreement which also provides grants for both individuals and employers to help with training supports, employment partnerships, can the Minister confirm whether that one is fully subscribed or that's also still an aspiration or goal to actually spend all that money? Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister for Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, when I'm talking about the programs, I'm talking about all of our labour market programs as a whole have not been all fully subscribed. To compare the numbers of where each of them have been at, I would need to get back to the Member as far as their subscription rates. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I mean, I know that there's also been a lot of work to try to ramp up the SNAP program and that might help feed into some of these programs, right, so if we're getting more students, you know, leading them towards apprenticeships then we'll see more uptake as they get a bit older. And so it does seem like there has been some increases -- okay, and so now I'm looking at page 14 in the business plan.
There has at least been an increase from 5 to 6. Okay, if I go up -- in any case, has the Minister tried to identify, like, what are the barriers to expanding that SNAP program even more, to have it be taken up by even more students across the territory? I know it's been stuck at sort of it's -- it's been active in four regions of the territory. I know one of the goals is to expand it to more of the communities and more of the regions in the territory, and that hasn't seemed to happen so far. Does the Minister have any insights into what's stopping it from expanding to more regions or attracting more people? Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Member. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. So absolutely, Madam Chair, I don't think it would be a shock to anybody in this room that I am obsessed with the SNAP program. And the Member is 100 percent right, I want to see this program in not just every region. I would love us to be overambitious and see it in every single community because I think at the end of the day, we would -- it would serve the entire territory in such a positive way.
So this program, really, over the course of the last four years has exploded in numbers, and that is in gratitude to the staff at ECE that have really hit the pavement and really hit the road in making those relationships. And so what is the biggest thing that we need in the territory in order to make this program work, especially in every single community across the territory? We need those relationships. We need employers who have journey persons on staff, who are willing to take on a SNAP student. That is the number one thing that we need here. If we can find those relationships, we can certainly turn around and find the students. But first and foremost, we need those employers willing to take on students. I'll stop there. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll go to the Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Madam Chair. It does make sense, and I look forward to sort of further conversations with the Minister and colleagues to -- for us to brainstorm and find pathways forward to, you know, find more journey persons to take on apprentices, find more employers. And I should clarify too that when I was talking about moving from 5 to 6, so there's more SNAP student participants in that but it's that there were 5 SNAP students registered as apprentices, and then it's gone to now 6 registered apprentices.
My last question, so also another big highlight in the business plan which I know the Minister is a big fan of is the laddering programs, and it talks about the number of laddering programs we're trying to increase and the number of students. But can the Minister explain what exactly is a laddering plan and how we count them or how we know, you know, if we're going from 35 to something, what is a laddering plan and how do you count them? Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you. I'll go to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you so much, Madam Chair. So a laddering program is a program that you take, you know, this course here, and that course there affords you also the experience that you need and the credentialing that you need to get to the second part of the course. And so a great example of that -- not one that we have currently in the Northwest Territories, but that I would love to one day see -- is, for example, if you sign up for a nursing program through Ryerson College today and you for some reason have to withdraw after the first year, they ensure that you finish with your personal support worker program. If you go back and you have remained for two years, they ensure that you finish with, for example, your licensed nursing program. If you stay for all four years, you finish with your registered nursing program.
So that's an example of a laddering program is where based on how many years you stay, you still finish every year with a different credential. And what that accounts for is we know that life comes up, we know that everyone's living circumstances are different and people might have -- they might have an intention to be on a program for four years, but that's not always what people are able to do. So laddering programs allow us to build on our experience within our education and training system. So that are the types of programs that we have in the territory. Thank you.
