Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s interesting that the department and the Minister are not hearing what the concerns are because we, as MLAs, are certainly hearing them and the responses that we are getting are completely understandable. We hear from people. I know this is supposed to be a short supplementary – I could stand here all day on this topic – so let me just go and ask the Minister a final question.

How much analysis went into the cost of adding Junior Kindergarten to existing schools on a community-by-community basis? Because when we, as the Standing Committee on Social Programs, heard...

Thank you, Deputy Minister Campbell. General comments. Anything further, Mr. Bouchard?

The Minister refers to very, very broad initiatives like the Aboriginal Achievement Initiative. These are laudable and good goals to have, Aboriginal achievement, but when it gets down to the details about how we achieve that, there has to be more analysis than talking to people and consulting people at a regional level. We need to know what is on the ground; we need to identify what is already going on in every community. Every community is different, every community has a different level of resources already being dedicated to early childhood development. So it needs to be on a community-by...

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Minister Miltenberger.

Mr. Speaker, like I said, I hate to see things regress; I hate to see things torn down; and we are going to throw away federal money for Aboriginal Head Start; we’re going to throw away the community participation and the dollars, the volunteers, because we’re saying we’re going to take over educating the four-year-olds, and we’re not going to do a very good job with the plan that we have in hand.

I’m going to ask the Minister today, later on, if he will go back to the drawing board. Let’s start again, let’s find out where the need is, let’s identify the resources, and let’s come up with a much...

Thank you. I will ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to please escort the witnesses to the table.

For the record, Mr. Miltenberger, could you please introduce your witnesses?

I’d like to call Committee of the Whole back to order and the department up next is the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. I’d like to ask Minister Miltenberger if he would like to bring witnesses into the Chamber.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Does committee agree?

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...