Alfred Moses

There are various areas in terms of the literacy funding. It goes up. We have a bunch of other early childhood programs as well and other healthy children initiatives. I will give it to my DM to get into more detail on that funding and how some of that is allocated. Deputy Minister Stewart.

Yes, and our department will provide that information as well.

Yes, we are looking at possibly working with the federal government. Not possibly: we're working with the federal government to see if we can get any kind of funding through their Heritage Canada Plan as well infrastructure dollars that might be there. We have also met with the French association, Commission scolaire and talked about how we can move forward and looking at those kind of fundings for infrastructure. Thank you.

Yes, we will be developing reports, and we will share that with committee. I am sure the residents of the North would like to get information on that. With our early childhood, in terms of monitoring, we do have an Early Development Instrument that reflects how children are going into the K to 12 system. What we have developed now is an MDI, Middle Development Instrument, which is pretty neat in the sense that all these students that went through the EDI are now just going into this year and will now develop on the end, looked at on the MDI. We will see what improvements have been made and how...

As mentioned, earlier within some of the other discussions around how we fund French and Aboriginal languages, obviously we do utilize all the federal funding and sometimes we do top it up with some of our funding as well, GNWT funding.

As I mentioned, Mr. Speaker, we're just waiting for the request, see what the cost will be, and we'll wait until the staff at Moose Kerr School brings it to the department, and we'll take it from there.

Yes. As I stated, when we go through position reductions, it is always a difficult exercise, and any reductions we did make, we made sure that the program services were not going to be impacted, and that other staff can also participate in the workload. Generally, the process was that senior managers were asked to look at their operations and proposed options coming forward. There needed to be some balance between position reductions and other operating expenses like travel and other O and M and any other program changes. ECE is particularly challenged, because obviously, we don't want to...

That funding is sunsetting and it was funding that we did give to WSEC in the contribution.

Yes, there are four positions. The admin secretary, research assistant, the archivist, and then the library clerk. They were all reductions. Positions were also filled.

The first pot of money was, as I mentioned, for programs in the Aboriginal and French language services. The second program is just for K to 12 school programs specifically for French. More detail on what kind of programs there are, maybe I'll ask my deputy minister to get into more details. But those are dollars that go to the schools and they work on what kind of programs and services that they feel is appropriate to be done. But any more detail, I can ask my deputy minister.