Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, previous, before we made the changes to the income assistance program, the federal child benefit was actually counted as income. What we did was we took that child tax benefit out of the assessment, which came out of the food and clothing and used it to recalculate how we get the new funding going forward.

So it was actually part of the food and clothing. That came out, so it wouldn't be re-assessed again. The NWT contribution remained the same. That is what is shown. It was just taken out to do a different way of re-calculating. That is what the Member is...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Implementation of the Junior Kindergarten Program, as we're looking to implement in 2017-18, will have no impact on the funding for Aboriginal Head Start program. The Aboriginal Head Start program is a federally funded program. We also fund Aboriginal Head Start through our Early Childhood Programs. In 2015-16, we funded the programs to the total of 260,000 additional dollars on top of the federal funding that they get, and it's forecasted that we'll have $285,000 to the eight Aboriginal Head Start programs throughout the Northwest Territories. So from our standpoint as...

When we restructured the program, the Federal Child Tax Benefit was included in the assessments. We took those assessments out. Our contribution, the NWT's contribution, hasn't changed. That's what the Member is seeing, that number now, not included with the federal dollars. So not that the federal dollars are out and we're not assessing it. It does look like the funding went down for food and clothing, which, in fact, it hasn't. Actually, more families are getting more money.

Since we haven't had any concerns brought forward since we did the implementation, as a result we did do a review. We...

As I mentioned, Aboriginal Head Start is a federally funded program, so I think what we can do out of our department is reach out to our federal counterparts and see why it's only a three-month contract and can do that work on behalf of the Members to see why it's only a three-month program moving forward.

As this has been an ongoing concern, both in Hay River and Yellowknife, a lot of consultation went in to developing this report. When we look at the recommendation and come up with our decision, it will be a final decision moving forward and hopefully be ready for the next academic school year.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As mentioned, I did get questions on this earlier in the week. We’re just waiting for the reports to be written up by the independent review, and in that report, we are going to get some recommendations. We’ll sit down with our staff, decide what we’re going to be doing in terms of moving forward with the ministerial directive, and then be presenting that to both the Commission scolaire and all the interested parties involved in Hay River and Yellowknife. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

In terms of the report, when it was brought forth in this House in a previous sitting, there was discussions about reviewing the ministerial directive, which we did. We got an independent review to go out and speak with all the stakeholders on how they wanted to proceed and move forward. From that consultation, we developed a report which was an independent report. We will take those recommendations from what we heard from the stakeholders and we will make the final decision, moving forward from the academic school year. We will talk to the department about sharing that report. Obviously, it’s...

I don’t have a specific date in mind. However, after I meet with the departments, review that report, look at the recommendations, we will come up with a decision and we will present, we will send letters out to all the stakeholders that are involved that will be affected by the ministerial directives. As soon as we get the report and look at the recommendations that were provided to us, we will get letters out to the stakeholders.

Yes, we’ll get our staff to work with the education authority to see how we can address the space issue down in Ndilo.

Ideally we’d like the school boards to come up with a solution to adjust the issue. Our department is working with both school boards to see how we can adjust some of the space sharing agreements. We’re looking at trying to make some decisions here. Our department is going to be working with the education authorities to see how we can adjust some of that space sharing concerns in Hay River and with the gymnasiums as well.