Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment today. With all due respect to the Minister and the good intentions of the Department of Education, Culture and Employment with respect to Junior Kindergarten as a response to the need for more emphasis on early childhood development, I believe that the rollout and the planning and the way that this is being implemented is not right. There are so many downfalls. There are so many negative repercussions in the larger centres where we already have a very good focus on early childhood development.

I am...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister is bound and determined, regardless of the facts, to proceed with implementing Junior Kindergarten in all communities. Please reconsider, please take those resources and direct them to where there are no options for early childhood development in some of the smaller communities, and please don’t with your wide-sweeping approach, ruin a good thing that’s going on in the larger and the regional centres.

Please, would the Minister tell me how he expects the larger schools and the larger communities, and even in the smaller communities, according to my colleague...

This is a perfect example of the government delivering an initiative that they think is good in a very wide broadcast area without the thinking and without the rationalization and the figuring out what the ripple effect is. There’s no sense in re-evaluating Junior Kindergarten in Hay River after you have gutted Aboriginal Head Start, Treehouse, Growing Together, French preschool, the Hay River Cooperative Playschool, which has trained professionals that have been in those jobs for many years. It’s an institution in our community. The community donates $50,000 a year to the Hay River...

As the only government department that is involved in the protection of consumers through, I don’t know if it’s an agency or secretariat, consumer affairs in the Northwest Territories, does the Minister see his department having any role with respect to that federal Competition Act? Is that something that he, through his department, could be involved in on behalf of consumers in the Northwest Territories if those complaints were raised to him?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement today, I talked about the rising costs of petroleum products. Everything we do in the North, it seems like we rely on these products to drive our vehicles, industry depends on it, subsistence harvesting, we heat our homes with heating oil. Even in Hay River where we use propane, that’s tied to the price of oil, that’s how they set the price of propane.

I’d like to ask the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs if his department has been doing any monitoring and research to look at the correlation between the prices on the world market and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yesterday in my Member’s statement, I talked about the cost of living in the Northwest Territories. As we watch the news, we can see the price of crude oil has dropped 25 percent in the very last weeks and months. I would challenge the retailers of these petroleum products in the Northwest Territories, to ask them why the prices for our home heating oil and our fuel at the pump has not gone down accordingly.

They used to say that it was inventory in their tanks and they only got it in every so often, so although the price of crude may change or the price per barrel of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m not here to launch any kind of attack on retailers of petroleum products, but I guess we’re so attentive to these costs and the cost of living in the North that it’s something that catches our attention and we think that we should also realize the benefits when the prices go down.

When the GNWT buys petroleum products and then redistributes them to the small communities where there is no private retailer involved, what’s the lag time? Like, how far ahead do they buy or fix those prices?

The world price for oil has gone down substantially in the last few months. It is the leading story often on the evening news as markets respond to this declining price.

What’s the lag or delay time between when those prices appear and when we might actually see some relief in the prices that we pay at the truck and at the pump here in the Northwest Territories? How is that regulated?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to also recognize a Hay River resident, Mr. Kevin Wallington, who is also a very dear family friend of ours. I would also like to recognize Wendy Morgan. We couldn’t get her in here for her 60th birthday last Friday but we got her here today.

---Laughter

Oh, did I day 60? Sorry. Anyway, you will notice on her door it says, “Wendy Morgan, Constituency Assistant to Jane Groenewegen, Hay River South.” Thank you.

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Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I listen to my colleagues in this House share the stories of their communities and their regions with respect to the costs of living, and I hear of stories of people who want to leave the North because of the cost of living and people who feel they don’t have options to stay here, I think this government does have a role to play in helping to quantify some of that seemingly anecdotal information. I don’t know if we’ve undertaken an exercise like this lately, but I think the government should look at the different communities. We cannot compare Tuktoyaktuk cost of...