Bob Bromley

Yes, just to finish that off, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the Minister. Did the communities receive the same funding this year as they did last year, or did they receive the full amount last year, and are we committed, are these long-term programs now, or are we still trying to portray these as pilot projects that nobody is going to invest in?

A huge disappointment here, obviously. This is molasses at 40 below. The committee has been clear that we want these on-the-ground community programs in place. So, based on what I heard, if I heard it accurately, extremely disappointing.

As we know, last year at this time, when we looked at the budget, the money had not been delivered to those communities, or perhaps it was delivered during the week that we were discussing it. So within a few weeks they had to spend all that money, probably frantically and inefficiently. So, again, I’m not impressed and I think this department needs some...

Thanks to the Minister. Very briefly, a comment, this will be my last comment hopefully on ECD, early childhood development. The premise that junior kindergarten is the way to go rather than focussing on zero to three, I know the Minister is aware that this is a contention here. Particularly on the claim that because services for zero to three age classes are fragmented, is a great leap and highly debatable, huge assumptions made there and I totally disagree with that. I think we are missing the boat. There is little evidence that the issues we are seeing can be addressed through junior...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do have a lot of questions. I’ll see what I can get through here, and I appreciate very short, concise answers. Junior kindergarten, what’s the junior kindergarten implementation dollar amount for the 29 communities scheduled in ’14-15? That’s the year under discussion.

Secondly, I know the Minister has agreed that a fully qualified ECE worker is needed for every junior kindergarten group. I don’t call them a class because that implies teaching. We’re talking child development. The Minister has agreed with that, but I still haven’t heard him commit to meeting this...

Again, just for my simplistic understanding here, we don’t anticipate the general amount to change over the course of those 35 years or whatever. Is that correct?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I realize the amount being contributed to Northwest Territories Housing Corporation has taken a big leap this year, from $67 million to $83 million. My understanding is that this is going towards bumping up housing in small communities outside of Yellowknife in particular. Am I correct in that understanding? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is a huge page, $241 million. There are probably a number of questions here, but I’ll start with a few. With the adult post-secondary education, ALBE, review that was done by the program review office and I think some of the work of the Auditor General and comments from Members, how has the ALBE work been tuned up and made more effective through those reviews and the valuation work that was implemented as a result of that? Thank you.

What I’m hearing is once you get up into the very high income bracket, you get a protection of about $1,000 and you may be paying several thousand dollars. For the rest, everybody can be protected under that very high income bracket and there would be no effect assuming we adjusted the cost of living tax credit, which would also likely benefit those people again in the high income bracket. Again, I don’t see this holding much water except to protect those in the very high income brackets that obviously don’t need the same degree of protection that we could and very obviously are serving, as we...

As I mentioned before, this is starting to create a pattern. I’m all in favour of dilution…

---Laughter

…devolution, we all are. We want devolution for the people of the NWT, not just to the GNWT Executive. How does the Premier propose to reverse these power grabs and put oil and gas decision-making back in the realm of independent and fair public boards? If he’d like to add how we’re going to do all this public consultation instead of just saying that and creating structures that don’t have any public consultation, I’d be happy to hear that too. Mahsi.

That’s fine. Thanks very much. Perhaps the Minister’s discussion paper on that developed in consultation with the Regular Members could be part of that. That’s all I had. Thank you.