Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to focus on a difficult issue of seeking equity on parental custody arrangements to serve the best interests of children and parents caught up in divorce.

Data shows that when it comes time to determine custody arrangements in divorce, children are most often put in the exclusive custody of the mother. Statistics Canada indicates this is so in 80 percent of cases, with fathers at 7 percent of cases and shared custody in only 13 percent.

Our family courts make custody determinations on the basis of individual circumstances. The first priority must be to set...

I appreciate that offer and I’d like to be notified whether or not Education has confirmed things within the next two weeks. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to ask about the plans for the interior works on the Kay Tay Whee School in Detah. I understand that that work was originally scheduled for last year, but there were some reassessments of the specific needs. I know the needs have been accumulated; the school has been adding grades on both ends. I think preschool classes have been added as well as Grade 7 and Grade 8 this year. So there is an obvious need.

When can we expect this work? I think the kids are out of school next month. Are we on the ground next month in getting this work done for the fall? Thank...

I appreciate the Minister’s comments. I disagree, though, that we should be spending the money in this way when I think the Minister is well aware that we need to be recycling more and more things. We’ve had a request and a commitment from the Minister to add all kinds of things to the things and to list of things that we are recycling that have not been done. To my mind, and I know to much of the public, that is the way we should be going with those funds that they have paid for recycling.

Another consideration, which I hear almost weekly, is that we should not be having an environmental tax...

Obviously, I have a lot of problems with the Minister’s comments. We’re not talking about facilities elsewhere; we’re talking about Stanton Territorial Hospital, our premier health service centre for those that are in desperate need of care. They come here from across the Territories.

I’d say there is certainly no clear commitment that the Minister continually refers to with budgets like this for the work that’s required. We’re talking more than the Tuk highway, which is probably a 300 or 400 million dollar project or more. We know it’s well over $300 million and we’re talking about $2 million...

Thank you. I feel like I’m at the witness table here, Mr. Chair.

---Laughter

But since the comment was directed at me, I appreciate hearing from the Member for Hay River where these jobs are being moved to. I’m sure it was an unbiased comment. I would ask the Member to check out the Hansard for today and see if I had any complaint whatsoever about the jobs leaving Yellowknife. I think I stated fairly clearly, perhaps abundantly clearly, that I support decentralization, done in an intelligent manner. But I still do appreciate my colleague’s comments, all of them. Mahsi.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to follow up on the Stanton Hospital line items here. What was the budget? I understand that this is work that wasn’t done. It was supposed to be done. What was the budget for the work that was to be done in the year that this carried over from?

Thanks to the Minister for that response. That was pretty clear. I don’t really disagree with what he said there as long as we are doing decentralization intelligently. Decentralizing when there is already an overabundance relative to the rest of the territory of government workers is a strange process to achieve decentralization to me.

The other aspect is we want to know what the full costs are. Will the Minister commit to telling us how long these positions remain empty and this service is not provided and report to us regularly on that? I guess I would ask that the Premier do that, as well...

Thanks to the Minister. I’m glad to hear that. I think one of the things we did was we moved our discussion of the capital budget to the fall, an October session, and that was supposed to help a whole lot because it allowed a lot of planning to take place so that when April 1st hit, things were off to a running start. There were a couple of other things that we did specifically. Are those not working any longer, or why is this still high? We did some really major things to address this.

I think another thing we did that I recall is we moved from a D level estimate on costs to C level, which is...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks again for that response. My constituents include the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and many of the Akaitcho people. Every new land alienation in the Chief Drygeese territory makes it more complex and difficult to finally conclude a just land settlement for the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. The federal government seems to interpret their fiduciary role here in a very strange way. I am surprised YKDFN hasn’t thrown up their hands and told the federal government they will see them in court.

If YKDFN does decide to go to legal action to halt this erosion of their...