Alfred Moses

The income assistance program does not specifically subsidize freight. When we do the calculations, all the factors that I have mentioned before are what we use. Moving forward, however, the Nutrition North Canada Program offered by the Government of Canada provides vendors with a subsidy for freight costs.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As this is a piloted project for the next three years, each school will develop their own plan in terms of instructional hours. They are working on those right now. They should be done, each school should have their instructional hours plan developed, by the end of March, so my suggestion to you, as any parent approaches you, ask them to go and speak to the principal or the superintendent on how this is going to roll out in the specific school's plan.

We have three policy officers and one manager.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Obviously there was mixed messaging going out from various parties, as well as the change in funding. At the beginning of this session, when we started, we had a funding model going through, but that had changed by the time we got started and had the budget addressed. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I don't disagree with all the honourable Members who have mentioned the communication issues surrounding junior kindergarten. I definitely think that it could have rolled out a lot better, getting that information not only out to the Members but to the residents. We are working on our communications protocol and making sure that we're making it as sufficient as we can in the future. As I mentioned earlier, we take it as a learning experience and we'll be learning from this and making sure that, as we communicate, there will be more efficiency a lot sooner than later...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To be honest, it goes beyond the 19 of us in this House. We also have a lot of partners with the education authorities and the board chairs, and we don't always come to an agreement. When we're putting one message out there and we have other education authorities, it could be even other Members putting a different message out there, it's not putting out the best face in favour of us as a government. So obviously we've all got to work together and that messaging has to be a shared and common message moving forward, and, as I mentioned, it goes beyond the 19 of us. We have...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank all the honourable Members for all their comments and their concerns, and over the past three weeks there's a lot of common theme that every honourable Member has mentioned here today. I don’t really want to get into detail regarding those, but first off I just really do want to emphasize that this Department of Education, Culture and Employment does, in fact, do a lot of good work as well in the territory. We have a lot of good employees who do a lot of good work for residents, whether it's in income assistance, the JK-to-12 system, post-secondary...

Can I confirm: does the Member want our communications protocol? Can the Member confirm? Thank you.

Yes, I do, Mr. Chair.

I'll go to my deputy minister for that one. Thank you