Caitlin Cleveland

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I think it's important to note that not everything that the government does lands in the business plans. There's still action plans that are still daytoday efforts that are done by public servants and by Northerners day in and day out that don't land themselves in the business plans per se. But educating children and making sure that we are preparing them for the rest of their lives is something that is constantly top of mind for northern educators, for parents, for community members, and something that we need to continue to do. So while these...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the Member's excitement and ensuring that we're continuing to work on this. I think that it'll be a exciting term for creating systems for people wanting to come to Canada and make the Northwest Territories home.

We have a staff member within Education, Culture and Employment at this time. Moving forward, we will be transitioning a second staff member from ITI over to Education, Culture and Employment. And so being able to really double that team, I think, will do a lot of good for ECE in being able to support people within this space. And...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, ECE receives $5.9 million from the federal government that is immediately distributed to Indigenous governments for the purposes of Indigenous languages. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, it is one of those ones where, you know, we look at the way that things operate and sometimes we have ideas how to make them better. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don't. This is one that the department is very confident will help us grow our resources for culture and language, specifically especially language revitalization. There's you know and like the Member said, none of us will disagree with that. I think one of the things that's really critical about this as well is we were able to internally fund this position. We did not have to go...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, while the department no longer requires clients of income assistance to partake in productive choices, I do understand the goals of the Member, and I have really appreciated all the Member's statements that he has done on income assistance. It has provided me with the opportunity to learn about what his goals are and what the realities are in the communities that he represents.

With that being said, I want to confirm for the Member that as part of the new income assistance program that there is a performance measurement plan that is intended within that...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Yes, Mr. Chair, it was immediately taken down and an apology was immediately issued to residents of the Northwest Territories. And right away, following that, checks and balances were put in place with staff to ensure that something like that did not happen again, and we were able to use our existing resources to make sure that that was done. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I think that we this theme day could not have come at a better time because we are at the beginning of what I see as a very exciting time within the department of education and within income assistance. We are on the verge of entering into this new program. It starts in the month of July. That new program will see increased opportunities for client navigators to be able to work with income assistance clients and to be able to work on those pathways. And part of the information coming out of that will be through this performance management plan...

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I can commit to that to the Member.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I am lucky enough to serve on Cabinet with a housing Minister who also calls one of our small communities home and is also very passionate about making sure that the teachers who live in her community and in other communities in the Northwest Territories have a place to lay their head so that they can provide quality education to our students. So the Minister and myself have already begun to have meetings about how we can work together to support one another in this effort because we recognize it as a significant need across the territory.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, this is going to take me into the income assistance section. So it is absolutely one of our deliverables under or business plan to work collaboratively with the primary's department, and that would take us into working with departments as well, like housing with Minister Kuptana. Within and one of the things we talked about quite a bit today was the ability of the new income assistance program to free up some time of the client navigators within the income assistance division so that as they are working with some of our most vulnerable residents...