Charles Dent

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I said, as long as the apprentice works with either an apprenticeship officer or CDO to make sure that the training is recognized and approved by us. If you’re going to NAIT or SAIT or some other recognized institution, then there should not be a problem. It should be no problem at all.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The $300,000 reduction is to the Workplace Literacy Program. It does not affect the funding that would flow to the Literacy Council or community literacy programs. As Members know, we were tasked to find reductions throughout government and one of the areas we looked for was where the funding wasn’t being used on a consistent basis, and what we found was in that program $300,000 was being lapsed consistently because businesses weren’t coming to us with applications to use it. So we don’t think that this will lead to a large impact, because it’s money that wasn’t...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, I can’t. We don’t have that information. We could endeavour to have it delivered to Mr. Hawkins tomorrow.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s not totally consistent with our other approaches, but we would likely wind up in the same situation as we did with social workers. If we didn’t insist on it, we would have to probably stop offering it anywhere in the Northwest Territories. We’ve been challenged to try and provide as much training as possible in the Northwest Territories. We have very few students who take this; that’s why we can’t offer all the school courses for apprentices in the Northwest Territories. We have chosen a few and we have chosen to try and make sure we offer those ones in the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We know that it was essential to help get the industry up and going in the first instance. I’m not sure that it would be valuable now to follow up with a study as to how important it was. We don’t believe that the businesses would have gotten started here without this kind of subsidy. We know that from negotiations we had with the first people who came into the field. The fact that we do have factories that are up and polishing, now indicates, I would argue, that the program has been successful. The continued uptake of graduates from our training course also...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The public housing subsidy money is being moved over as a first step in taking a look at the program. We thought it was better to tie all subsidies together in one area with the government. At some time in the future, we may look at splitting the department, so that you have the area that has the adult training and subsidies as one department and the early childhood and K to 12 being another department.

So this is the first step in restructuring government to put subsidies all together and allowing the Housing Corporation the opportunity to focus on a single mandate...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The School Planning and Resource Committee, or SPARC, meets annually, at least, to review the formula and propose changes or modifications to the formula. So it is regularly reviewed. I can’t tell you when the formula was first put in place, but the membership on SPARC includes representatives from the divisional education councils. So the superintendents typically are involved in discussing the formula. Everybody knows we have a certain amount of dollars and the discussion is then how to best allocate it. That’s the committee where the decisions are recommended from.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There's no money in here for an addition to Mangilaluk School. I have made the offer to the community to provide some staff to work with them, to examine a small renovation to accommodate the high school. I think we agree there needs to be some accommodation to properly house high school students in that school. But, unfortunately, the student population in the community appears to be dropping. The school, at one time, was looking like it would become crowded and we did have an addition on the drawing board; but right now, school capacity is 330 and the school...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The reductions and elimination of wage subsidies to diamond manufacturing employees of $84,000 is included in there, and there’s a reallocation of salary funding. It’s an internal reallocation of $94,000 being transferred from apprenticeship to fund an existing career development officer position, because we have been able to fund one of the apprenticeship positions under the Labour Market Development Agreement. So there’s no change in the numbers of people doing the jobs, we’ve just been able to move some of our funding into a different area.

Mr. Chairman, if the Member is asking about the regional distribution of the numbers, we don’t allocate the numbers by region. It’s a total allocation across the Northwest Territories and money changes. If the North Slave region doesn’t need to have as much because the economy is good, then that money doesn’t get used there, but it may get used in another region. What we have found is that different regions have different demands every year because of the economy’s fluctuations.