Charles Dent

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, first thing we have to do is make sure the existing day care operators are well supported. We know a lot of them are struggling, so we think the first thing we have to do with this money, since it’s one-time money, we can’t count on it being ongoing, in fact, we know for sure it won’t be ongoing money, we were looking for opportunities to help existing day care operators to better survive. If we create new day care spaces without having resolved the ongoing operations concerns, that isn’t helpful in the long run. The Member is right; we need to look for...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The amount of money we are proposing to include in the supplementary appropriation is based on the contribution we got from the federal government last year and that is some $940,000. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m not prepared to commit to a full-blown committee to go out and conduct hearings to hear what people think we should be doing with student financial assistance. I’d rather put the money into the program if we could afford that kind of thing. What I will commit to is the Member has raised a good point and that is that we should make sure we are encouraging people to attend our northern college. We have a real investment in the northern campuses and we need to make sure that we are supporting people to go there. I have already directed the department that over the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Member knows, we’re in the process of reviewing our income security programs, all of them right now. Over the course of the next six months to a year, yes, we will be looking at all of our programs. But there are some specific aspects of the public housing rental subsidy that we will be looking at definitely in the next six months and one of them is the change in the way that the month is used to determine what your rent is. Previously, the housing associations were using the rent based on, for instance, if you went in on February 28th and said here’s what my...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ll be in touch with the department immediately to see how quickly we can arrange that. I can’t promise within the next two days, but we will ensure that it happens as quickly as possible. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In one of the supplementary bills that will be shortly before this House there will be some money from the previous commitments made by the former government. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are hoping, through the business planning process, to be able to build on the federal government’s addition of $100 monthly to all parents with children under the age of six by increasing the user subsidies in the next business planning process. That should then allow day cares to increase their charges to parents. That should help to alleviate the problems that day cares may face with funding. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, Aurora College, through the Aurora Research Institute, has been asked by the Government of Canada and NRCAN and the Japanese Oil Gas and Metals National Corporation to assist with the delivery of a major research project in the Inuvik region. This is called the Mallick Gas Hydrate Research Program. With us today in the gallery we have a number of key players as we try and move this project towards fruition. I’d like to recognize the leaders of each of the parts of the team. The Japanese scientist team is lead by Mr. Kenji Ohno, who is the general...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The money is proposed to be allocated on a regional basis. So, yes, there will be some money available for operators in Yellowknife. We believe that this money will help the operators. If they are facing a financial challenge, for whatever reason, this money will be available to them to defray other expenses that they would otherwise have to take out of their operation. So, yes, we think that this money will help the operators in Yellowknife. Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department is proposing that we put $200,000 of that money into the Language Nest Program. That program was started as a three-year pilot project and when we brought it forward three years ago, we proposed that the funding would decrease over time because we believed that the operators would find economies of scale and there wouldn’t need to be as much training each year and the cost would go down. As it’s turned out, almost all of the operators are using the funding to pay salaries. So the reduction, which is about $200,000 this year, is something that would...