Charles Dent

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have looked at this issue, in terms of student financial assistance officers. Given the nature of the program and how it works, in that all of the applications come in in a very short period of time, typically two times a year, there aren't enough dedicated staff to spread out across the Territories in a cost-effective way. I am certainly prepared to work with Members to see how we can strengthen the work of the regional offices, to make sure that they're working with students to help them navigate their way through the system. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, I apologize to the Member if a decision has been issued in this case in the last 24 hours, but my information is there is an appeal before the courts in Nunavut on this very issue that has been filed just in the last couple of weeks that has not yet been heard. So I am in a position where, under the rules of sub judice, I don’t believe I am able to answer his question.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In fact, there are no offices in the student financial assistance system that can make decisions that would have changed the situation the Member spoke of in his Member's statement today. The way our system is set, the officers have no power to overrule the regulations, and the regulations have to be followed explicitly. So a more important issue is, what can we do to make the regulations work for the students? The Member has brought an important issue to light here, where the regulations, in this situation, cost the government more money than if we had been able to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will have to discuss this with the college -- and I will commit to the Member that I will do that very quickly -- what the options might be, so that I can make sure that the directors can have to see the answers to those questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the community of Colville Lake started up as a community where the people said they wanted a traditional community. They, still today, don't have a water plant, so we don't have an ability to put in water and plumbing in that community. We understand that that will be installed by MACA within the next year. The modular classroom that we're going to add to the facility there will accommodate modern facilities to take advantage of the water plant that's being installed in the community.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I will continue to work with the college to see if we can find a way to address the housing issue, but this government has invested heavily in assistance to the nursing program. That’s because of the difficulty we are having filling nursing positions across the North. So we put a real emphasis on getting northerners into the field. The Member is right, though, we need to see a similar sort of emphasis on the trades. We have, this year, put an extra $600,000 into trades training. What we are doing there is encouraging employers to take on tradespeople...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To the credit of the families in the community, there has been tremendous growth in the population in that school. In the year 2000, there were only 19 students using the school, when we first started talking about an addition. But as the Member has pointed out, there is some pressure to move very quickly on this issue, and a plan to add to that school would probably be time consuming and relatively expensive, because of the nature of that school. It's not a regular shaped building, Mr. Speaker. It's a log structure, which is really quite striking, and has a number...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the amount of money that was cut from the workplace literacy budget last year was the amount that historically had not been taken up by employers. If we can find a way to increase the number of applications coming in from employers to take advantage of that money, I can tell the Member that I'll go to bat to try and find money to increase that budget. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause

Good morning, colleagues. Mr. Speaker, in June of this year, communities throughout the Northwest Territories honoured their high school graduates. At the time these events were taking place, members of education authorities and educators told me that this was a banner year in terms of the number of students meeting graduation requirements. Now that the official numbers are in, I can confirm that, indeed, graduation levels were higher during the 2004-2005 academic year than they have ever been.

For reporting purposes, graduates are counted as of September...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm not sure that…I think we're going half way. I'm saying that if the school is offering a full-day kindergarten program, based on our curriculum, it is my goal to make sure that we're able to offer the funding to support that programming. We don't provide the budget right now. We don't say to a school, you have to have a librarian; we don't say that you have to have a computer specialist. Those decisions are made locally. The schools themselves determine whether or not they want to have those positions, and whether or not they want to use PTR funding in order to...