Caroline Cochrane

When I first took over Education, I was shocked that we didn't even offer the upper-level courses in all of the small communities. I was naive and made an assumption that education was accessible to all. I have since learned that that is not so.

At this point, we are just trying to get the Northern Distance Learning into all of the small communities. With the adding of the four that are coming up now, that will bring it up to 15. Those are for the upper level. Those are the grades that people cannot access right now, currently, in their communities, although we still have issues with other ones...

Thank you. No, that isn't correct. This money is negotiated in the agreement, the collective agreement, but we also provide additional training. We provide training on self-regulation. We provide training on the Indigenizing education. We provide training wherever possible. Training is critical, and it's something that Education takes seriously. It's not something that we just dump on the Association of Teachers and not provide anymore. This is in their collective agreement, and then we provide training as appropriate to the needs of initiatives that we're bringing forward. Thank you, Mr...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's really hard to work off of an example, but the key that I heard there is that the person does not want to apply for SFA. Income support is not meant to be an option. It is meant to meet your basic needs when there are no options. The first priority would be to talk to that individual and say, "Do you qualify?" Like, "Why aren't you getting SFA?" The whole goal of income support isn't so that people can just sit home and collect a cheque. That is not the goal. It is, when people have no other resources, that is when we step in. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do agree that we need to support anyone who actually looks at taking courses in Indigenous languages. Thanks to the federal funding, we have changed our courses that are available right now at Aurora College. It used to be a certificate program in language revitalization, and now we have bumped it up to actually being a degree program. Oh, it's still a certificate.

The other thing that we have is we have expanded our scholarships to provide for students [microphone turned off]...program. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This position is part-time, but we do have the regional early childhood development coordinators who actually provide the support necessary to the region, as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. "Autonomous," I'm not going to look it up in a dictionary. Maybe my staff. If you really want that, I can get it to you. The reality is that we provide Aurora College $32 million in a contribution agreement. When we did the review, the review stated out very clearly that they felt that Education, Culture and Employment was too entrenched in the college, and it said they need to be arm's length. They need to have their own autonomy to find what they want, grow up.

The government response came back and said that we will be; Education, Culture and Employment will take it over...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am going into the Nahendeh riding for a constituency tour, as long as the plans all follow through and we can get a double-engine plane. Anyone I hear at those meetings, I am willing to talk to. I am willing to listen to all of the concerns of the people, of whoever I meet with. That has just been my style. However, for me to make any commitments around how we are going to deal with upgrading or the community learning centres at that time would be inappropriate, because that is a process that has to be done within our polytechnic university as we move towards that...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Right now, we have 11. With the rollout of these extra four. That will bring us to 15, and then next year, we are looking at bringing it up another five, so that will bring us to 20 small schools, including the riding of Nahendeh.

I would love to be able to just say, like, "Yes, we are going to go live, and you know, it will be accessible to everyone," but it is very expensive programming and it takes a lot of work to actually do things like curriculum development. It is huge. Getting the teachers trained and providing that is huge. Also what I thought it would be a small...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The idea of the income support through the productive choices is to provide people the support so that they can prosper as they define "wellness," but, again, income support is for basic needs. If people are looking for education, they may need to combine the two programs together. They may need to combine that with the student financial assistance, if they qualify, and then sometimes people do need to be topped up with that, with income support. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The understanding is that they will be indeterminate unless we decide to give back control to the federal government. Thank you, Mr. Chair.