Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to welcome Chief Herbert Blake, Inuvik Native Band, as well as His Worship Mayor Mark Heyck. Grant Gowans is up there. He’s a childhood friend of mine and we grew up together on the streets of Inuvik and I want to welcome him to the House today. As well, I’d like to recognize and welcome all the Anti-Poverty Working Group here and I just want to wish them the best of luck, and keep up the good work that they’re doing. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. You’ve heard a lot of comments already, so I’m just going to keep mine really general, not general but to the point and try to keep it short.

There are concerns in Inuvik. Anyone who has been up there and driven from the airport to the community of Inuvik, there are a lot of areas that still need some attending to. In some cases it can be pretty dangerous, depending on the speed that you’re driving.

I also believe the Minister is quite well aware of the runway issues we had and the sinkhole that appeared not too long ago. We need to address those and that whole system to...

Thank you. When we talk about these, I guess I wouldn’t call them deals, but these agreements between the parents and the siblings, sometimes there’s mediation in there and that mediation comes from the social services worker themselves to say our objective is to keep the child in the family and that mediation, when it happens and the grandparent or the family member accepts it, then they’re also accepting that there are no financial incentives to go along with that. Speaking of which, can I ask the Minister, what incentives are there out there to get our families in the Northwest Territories...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have some questions in follow-up to my Member’s statement today. As I mentioned, the government is doing a lot of good work in terms of supporting foster families and getting the programs in place to make sure that children in the NWT are given the proper services that they are entitled to. I just want to follow up with the Minister of Health and Social Services in terms of trying to educate residents of the Northwest Territories how this government can support them should they want to become a foster family in the community, or else if they want to take the options...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In 1991 Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The convention recognizes children as citizens with the right to reach their fullest potential to be treated with dignity and respect, to be protected from harm, to exercise a voice, to engage in play and recreational activities, and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.

Furthermore, our government here just tabled a document Measuring Success and Focusing on Results. In this report it states a few statistics that I’d like to share with the Members here today as well as...

Thank you. I’m glad to hear that formula funding is something that’s going to be looked at and addressed. I think it’s long overdue because each authority only gets so many dollars to spend and when a lot of it goes into travel, that’s a lot taken out of the education components, the support components there.

Moving forward, one way that we can affect this is through a program that the Minister is very familiar with and that’s the e-learning program. I just wanted to make a little comment on the e-learning program. Committee has seen firsthand that program in action, seen the results that were...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. What I have here in my hands is the Early Childhood Development Framework of the Northwest Territories. In this framework we have seven commitments made by both the Department of Health and Social Services and Education, Culture and Employment. Within these seven commitments, we have 22 areas of action and underneath that, 39 deliverables and somewhere in the area of about 82 targets. I’m not sure if I counted them right. That’s just for this year alone, so moving forward I have a lot of questions about where we should be putting dollars.

When I look at these...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We heard a lot of questions here about early childhood development in the last couple of days. I have a motion that I’d like to read, please.

So some things I caught there were support mechanisms and specific training. As you heard yesterday, there was a lot of concern with stages of early childhood development. I do support the junior kindergarten programs in the small communities and the way it’s coming out, but we also need the prenatal to five and six, even to there, as a strong initiative.

I want to ask the Minister, in terms of specific training, if he’s familiar with the BC Early Learning Framework where they’ve actually developed child care licensing regulations. They have a child care sector occupational competencies. I...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m trying to get back into my frame of mind here. I know last night I was really eager to get into questions and comments, but since we left general comments yesterday I just want to open up with a couple of really quick remarks. With this department here, I know the Social Programs committee has had numerous dialogues on so many different topics that it’s really great to see where we are. I feel that all committee and Members really need to do is support and monitor and continue to keep the department accountable with all the work that has been going forward.

In the...