I think, developing some occupational competencies, when we develop this, is going to be very handy not only for this government but it will set the future for our educators. Yesterday I was really hoping I would be able to get through all my questions and answers in the 10 minutes.

I’m a strong supporter of where the department is going. However, I’ve come to realize that this page alone, education and culture, is 79 percent of the overall ECE budget, so there will definitely be a lot of questions. If you look further, it’s 15 percent of the overall budget that we’re going to be approving...

I know the collaboration between the departments of Health and Education Culture and Employment, and in the opening remarks it mentions that there is $511,000 for wage top-up and training to increase the program staff for licenced child care centres.

That got me thinking. I did have some discussions with an early childhood development specialist whose husband works up in Inuvik. We got to talking about these new initiatives and early childhood, and she mentioned that we need to have a specialist that can certify all these early childhood workers and currently we don’t have that. I want to ask...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize two Pages from Inuvik here today, Caitlyn Church and Ms. Olivia Inglangasuk, both of whose favourites sports are northern games. I asked them what did they like best about being here in the Legislative Assembly this week. They said it was fun and would definitely do it again. They also said you get to meet lots of people and all the important people, so I’m assuming that might be the Members. They also said that they get to go on TV a lot and you get free food. But most of all, they said they have a better understanding of how the government works...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Before I get into this motion specifically, the department and all Members of this Assembly have noticed that the Regular Members have introduced three motions particularly to this department. It’s not that we’re questioning their authority over what they’re doing, we just want to support the great things that are happening in education right now, early childhood development, child daycares and, in this case, the e-learning program.

We see what’s happening in the communities. We see how things are changing within the communities and throughout the Northwest Territories...

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. Although I don’t have the whole history of this program review office, I think that you’ve heard today from Members of the 16th Assembly that the initial attempts at putting this program review office in and the reasons behind it were not fully met. However, the history that I do have, just after we got elected to this House, was in February of 2012 we had a presentation from the Executive and there was a lot of cost savings, in the amount of, I believe, $17 million. The moment that committee made a recommendation to government to do anything to this cost savings or even...

The Minister mentioned that it works both ways and I agree. Our client service officers do a lot of work and work with a lot of individuals who sometimes get a little irritated with the process. Mainly I’m just worried about their safety if we do have a mobile client service officer going into the households of some of our clients.

The next question I have for the Minister is whether or not we have proper training across the whole department from region to region to ensure that the assessment that our client service officers do and the directors who approve these assessments have the proper...