Charles Dent

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There will be a number of federal dollars coming starting July 1st. Families with children under six will start to receive $100 a month for each child. So, arguably, that is federal money that is coming to the North. That money could easily be used by parents to help resolve financial issues at their day cares. I would expect that day cares would increase their rates to take advantage of the fact that that money is now available to parents. As I said, through the business planning process we’re hoping to be able to increase user subsidies and provide additional funding...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When this issue was first raised and the government was challenged to do a review of all charity leases, that was undertaken by Public Works. The information was brought to Cabinet. At that point, Cabinet decided that we should have a look and have a consistent approach across government for our charity leases. That work is underway and is expected to be completed later this summer. It will be considered at that point by Cabinet, so it is not one department doing one thing and another department doing another. We intend to look and see if there is a consistent...

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 guess as a Legislative Assembly we could have a discussion about the policy and whether or not we think that the no-fault insurance way in which the WCB has operated is the way that we want to do it. We could get rid of the WCB, bring in private insurance like they do in the States, and allow all sorts of litigation in order to see whether or not people get compensation. I think the system that we have, Mr. Speaker, is one that works well. There are some people who don’t feel that they’ve been satisfied and we have, with Valic’s situation, a case where the courts have...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The board has announced or said that they are not going to appeal the Valic decision. As I said, they are reviewing their policy. Their policy will be rewritten. They had, in September of 2004, issued a new policy for pain which dealt specifically with chronic pain and had felt that at that time that that policy would be in compliance with court decisions at that time. Now they are in light of more recent court decisions and they are reviewing their policy. So the understanding of the field has changed and the board is responding to that reality and will have a policy...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We need to be careful that we are not using these tests for comparison purposes, because we can’t. These tests are administered in our jurisdiction in a far different way than they are anywhere else that they are used. We don’t allow or don’t have the exclusions that are found in other jurisdictions, so that means that all of our students are participating in these exams whether they are on an individual education program or a modified program. In many other jurisdictions, that doesn’t happen. So we don’t have comparison.

These tests are designed for us to take a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We will certainly be following up on this. We have had some initial discussions with the chairs of all the divisional education councils across the Northwest Territories. Since the report the Member talks about has come out, there have been some changes to the formula that is used to fund schools and the funding has been disproportionately increased for the small schools in comparison to larger schools in recognition of some of those challenges. We are planning to continue our work with divisional educational councils to ensure that we are delivering as good a program...