Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I mentioned in previous sessions, our staff worked with Aurora College to look at some of these proposed cuts and made sure that we made informed decisions based on data and the information that they provided. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Yes, any time we do any major retrofits or replacement of a school, we do meet with community members and leadership to see what that might entail. However, we do have capital standards when we build our schools and infrastructure in our communities, and in some cases we do have governments, Indigenous governments, or other organizations, that want to make it bigger. At that point, we would have to go to a P3 process, but we always do involve community input.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Work at Kaw Tay Whee School in Detah has been on the capital planning list, as well, and needs some work. We are working with committee. Both for Detah and Ndilo, we are looking at addressing some of the capacity issues, but also the age of the school. Right now, a planning study will be undertaken in 20182019 for the replacement of the school.

As I mentioned, there has been a lot of work that was done to Moose Kerr School. I also mentioned that we have a lot of infrastructure within the Department of ECE. After every business, or every capital planning process, we do go back and look at our 20-year needs assessment. There are priorities in every community across the Northwest Territories. We also have 49 schools. We look at utilization rates when we take those into consideration, as well as our own needs assessment criteria, so those things come into play when we have to look at the whole scope of infrastructure needs within our...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. After every annual capital planning process, the department goes back and looks at its 20-year capital needs assessment. You have to understand that there are a lot of areas that we have to look into; colleges, museums, libraries, information technology, other infrastructure. Last year, in June of 2016, a review was done, it was looked at, and it was done by the Department of Infrastructure, and at that time it was considered to be in good condition. All the work that has gone into Moose Kerr School over the number of years, and the Member had made some mention of it...

As I mentioned previously, that document itself was not for distribution or not made public. I will have to take this back to my Cabinet colleagues to get some direction on whether or not we will release that report.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, we are aware of that review. A couple of things, just an update: some of those recommendations have been addressed in terms of working. Another one of those recommendations was to review the college's programs, and also service structure. The foundational review will, I believe, address that. At the same time, in the previous government, that report was also dismissed, but we also still looked at seeing if there was anything we could take out of that report. We also have new NWTspecific data that is going to help guide us into the way moving forward with Aurora...

No, not at all. Thank you.

We have career development officers, employment transition officers in all the regions, and we are trying to get them to get that information out to our NGOs, our companies, our businesses, our band offices to make sure that they understand that this program is actually in place and how we need partnerships, we need better dialogue and communications on how we can work together to get more employment in small communities.

If the Member wants, we can get that information on how the process went down in regards to our staff meeting with the Aurora College senior management, how this information was relayed, and how this discussion happened right from staff to staff. We will get that information for the Member.