Charles Dent

Thank you, Madam Chair. The graduation rate in the early '90s was 25 percent. So they do lag, but they are improving. You have to keep the kids in school to get the graduates. What are we doing? There is certainly a challenge to get kids to complete school. I think one of the biggest deciding factors as to whether or not young people are successful in school is family support. If kids aren’t being supported to get up in the morning and get out the door with breakfast in their stomachs, if they’re not supported, if school isn’t seen as important by the family, then it’s a real challenge to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes. I misspoke; I meant to say the Bureau of Statistics and not the Audit Bureau does the surveys.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Part of that is $84,000 which was an elimination of the wage subsidies to diamond manufacturing employers. This was a program that was in place for some time but was sunsetted. The other is an internal reallocation of salary funding of $94,000. We transferred funding from apprenticeship to fund an existing career development officer position because we were able to get funding for the apprenticeship position through the Labour Market Development Agreement. So we are basically using federal money to fund a position. That’s why we have moved our money out.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We have two apprenticeship officers in Yellowknife and the career development officers in the office help out with apprentices as well, but I can’t tell you how many apprentices are registered in Yellowknife. Again, that’s information I’d have to get for the Member. We have 300 apprentices registered in the Northwest Territories right now. I expect that most of them are registered in Yellowknife, but the exact number, I can’t tell you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess I would also remind Members that they are welcome to work as advocates for their constituents, working in person with them. If at any time they are not satisfied that things are being done properly, the appeals system is set up to deal with that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. What I said earlier is teachers are trained to deal with different grade levels in the classroom. It has always been the case that a teacher who's teaching Grade 4 would have some kids who are reading at Grade 3 level and some kids would be at Grade 5 level. It’s not unusual to have kids in a Grade 3/4 class reading at a Grade 2 or a Grade 6 level. Again, that’s not unusual. It never has been.

What we often hear from teachers in the Northwest Territories is they see more of that in the classroom here than what you might find in classrooms in other jurisdictions. So...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member has raised a lot of important issues and it will take me some time to address them. Inclusionary schooling is an idea where we say that everybody deserves an opportunity to be in a regular classroom, and the goal is to keep young people together by age grouping and working with them to realize their skills to the best of their abilities so that they can progress. It’s a program that has had tremendous success I think in the Northwest Territories. I know just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to some people in the Territories who are right now very...

I don’t believe we can get it to the Member that quickly, no. We have had people working on Mr. Villeneuve’s written question now for a few days and we have not managed to put all the information together. So, no. I would do my best to get him the information sometime tomorrow, but it won’t be before question period, no.

Mr. Chairman, I don’t believe they’re linked. I think the employer applies for a training-on-the-job subsidy. That’s not linked at all to the apprentice who goes by himself to book the schooling with their apprenticeship officer. We can follow up to make sure of that, but my understanding is it would be two separate programs and they’re not linked.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This would be one of the areas that some of the money might come from. It doesn’t come from just one area. The GNWT commitment to fund ASEP is in a couple of different places. So this is as good a place as any to talk about that program. The Member is right; we’re hoping that over the course of the ASEP program that there will be 800 people trained. They won’t all be miners, but they will be trained for jobs that are related to the industry.