Caroline Cochrane

I have to give credit where credit was due. It was under the guidance of the previous Minister of Education, who did a great job actually of increasing the amounts that are paying for subsidies to childcare centres to actually provide services for children. That was a great move on his part. I really recognize that, and congratulate him very much.

The other thing we are doing is that in the Member's speech. We have 11 communities that don't even have childcare centres. Research says early intervention is the key. Out of those 11 communities, we are working diligently. We are trying to get as...

Yes, absolutely. Actually, getting daycares into the communities is a priority. It's a mandate within this government, the 18th Legislative Assembly. We have 11 communities that don't have daycares, although we are working with a couple of them. Some of them aren't in the Member's ridings. Yes, we have regional coordinators who will go in and support anyone in the communities who is looking up to open up a daycare. We have start-up money. We have health and safety money.

Like I have said, we provide subsidies for the daycares directly. There's a lot of support. We need daycares. There's lot of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, the Canada and Northwest Territories Early Learning and Childcare Bilateral Agreement was signed. Within that agreement, it's not really designated for communities as much, but within the terms of early childhood development where they have extra money to top up our money, we will be using that for providing things like we are doing ECD, or early childhood development. There used to be a certificate program. We are now doing a diploma program with Aurora College. We have increased our scholarships for people trying to get into early childhood development. It used...

At this time, no, we are not supporting extra money for people to come in. I think it would be huge. It's a great idea. However, in honesty, it would be huge on daycares. That's based on my background with running daycares. It's that they use volunteers from all over the communities. It's powerful. The centre that I ran, they had speech pathologists coming in and, you know, people from Health and Social Services. We had elders coming in. We have parents coming in. If we started to support, it would be a matter of picking and choosing which ones get money and which ones don't. At this time, we...

At this time, no, we are not looking at a universal daycare program. I want to say that we actually have really subsidized, and I need to actually do some more work on the breakdown of how that looks like. We give money to the daycares directly to subsidize for it, so that they can have lower costs for children. That's based on if they are infants, or the age of the children. The younger the child, the more money daycare providers actually get. We give money to parents. If parents can't afford the daycare or subsidies or the daycare costs, they can come in if they are lower-income and actually...

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to recognize Ms. Arlene Hache, who is a good friend of mine and a mentor for many years, a lot of respect; and Ms. Katherine Underwood, who is here from Ryerson University. Welcome to the Leg.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This one was the most worrisome for myself. My understanding is this gives the person $30,000 they could spend during the election period, usually a month, and then an extra $30,000 for a year before. This does impact people who live in poverty. Again, like I said before, we need to make these Chambers as accessible as possible. I don't know very many people who live in poverty who could come up with $60,000 in a year, so therefore I will not be supporting this motion. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to section 27(2) of the Official Languages Act, I wish to table the following document entitled "2017-2018 Annual Report on the Official Languages." Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

In the government response that we tabled yesterday, it was stated that the advisory committee to the regional board will be set up and an advisory committee, or senate, or whatever we call it, will also be set up. One is to have regional representations from all of the regions in the Northwest Territories. The other one is to actually provide expert advice to the administrator on specifics regarding the post-secondary education. Those two boards, committees, are very critical, so they will be one of the first priorities. We did commit to that at least in the first two years, but I am hoping...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The territorial-wide vision is actually a political decision that will be made, but it's really important; we actually want the associate deputy minister of post-secondary renewal to be with us during that process because that person has to understand really clearly what the vision is, because the next step from that is to be able to do the post-secondary vision based off of the territorial vision. So it's a political decision, but that person will be helping to facilitate it.