David Krutko

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have heard from several residents of the Inuvik region about the lack of dental care in the Inuvik region. Without essential service, children and young adults are going without.

Mr. Speaker, dental care is just as important as health care. Mr. Speaker, the lack of adequate services in the Inuvik region are having to have families and family members pay their own way to Yellowknife at their own expense for their children to deal with braces. They see the oral dentists here in Yellowknife, Mr. Speaker, but, more importantly, they are bearing the costs. Again, they are...

Moving on to page 10-14, Education, Culture and Employment, information item, directorate and administration, active positions. Agreed?

Agreed. With that, information item, page 10-8, Education, Culture and Employment, infrastructure investment summary, information item.

Minister of Education.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do have a few issues in regard to the budget with this department and mostly in the area of the social program side in regard to income support, the housing supp program. I know that it’s being transferred back, but it does show up in your budget as money coming through CMHC. Again, the time it’s going to take to make this transition, I think that it’s important that we do try to implement it hopefully sooner than later.

But I do have concerns similar to my colleagues from the Sahtu and from the Nahendeh in regard to the whole policy development around income support and...

I, too, will be coming forward with a similar motion in regard to the community of Tsiigehtchic, because I believe that the community should have a high school teacher in the community. I think that if you’re going to deliver grades kindergarten to grade 9 and then also high school, you should have more than two teachers in a community. I think you can’t expect people to carry that large workload and, more importantly, expect to have quality education being provided in those communities. So, again, I will be bringing forward a similar motion dealing with the community of Tsiigehtchic. I think...

Mr. Devitt.

Mr. Beaulieu, are you questioning that the Minister responds to the questions now or do you want to wait until we conclude on the presentation, then have them answer the questions?

I have been working with Darius Cassidy from the Yukon in regards to seeing if they can look at a similar process that we have formulated in this House by way of forming a languages committee or commission to look at how we deal with languages over here and have passed on information on previous commissions we established, because they are in the same dilemma we are. So I am glad to hear from the Minister that he is working with his northern colleagues, because I think that is the approach that we are going to have to take in order to get some attention to this issue, because, I mean, no...

Moving on, page 10-13, Education, Culture and Employment, activity summary, directorate. Mr. Bromley.