R.J. Simpson

Thank you, Madam Chair. In Yellowknife, sometimes there are some schools that are owned by the education authority, and there are some schools that are owned by ECE. ECE covers the cost when it's an ECE asset, and the authority covers the cost when it's an authority asset. However, there are times when ECE might have, I won't say money lying around, but does have some funds that they could put towards these to assist the education bodies, and so, when that's the case, then we do our best to help them so that they can use their surplus on education. So I guess the answer is it depends. Thank...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't even know how long ago it was now; the days have all melded together. The Chief Public Health Officer, when she issued Emerging Wisely, she also issued a backgrounder document pertaining specifically to schools and the measures that needed to be taken in schools. Since that time, the department has been working with the education bodies to come up with plans on how they are going to implement those recommendations in schools to ensure that staff and students and the public remain safe in the upcoming school year.

There are 49 schools, which means there needs to...

Thank you. The project is on schedule. There is no delay. The carry-over is the difference between the cash flow forecast produced in 2017 and the actual expenditures incurred during 2019-2020. When you start a project, you estimate what the costs are going to be, and sometimes you don't get it 100 percent right. The project is currently at the end of the design development phase. The 100 percent construction documents were finalized at the beginning of May 2020, at which time the design consultant started the construction tender package. The draft package is completed, and the tender is out...

I'm not a statistician, but I'd think there would be a lot of effort expended to do that that would be better spent teaching languages. The Member wants to know every time someone becomes fluent. Well, hopefully, we're not going to be able to track that because it's going to be so many people. You go around to different communities, and they're doing different things. In certain places, they have early childhood where it's immersion. I don't think we're giving those children tests on a regular basis to determine, "Are you fluent, or are you not fluent?" It's not a simple black-and-white thing...

The Bureau of Statistics has information about the number of speakers. We don't have the information about which speakers have passed versus who has just recently acquired a language, but as I mentioned, work is under way to get better data, and hopefully, the Member will be pleased with what the future holds in terms of that.

As soon as the Chief Public Health Officer released Emerging Wisely as well as the backgrounder document related to schools in which she made the recommendation to reopen schools, the department and the education bodies and the NWT Teachers' Association have been meeting on a daily basis, working to plan for next school year. Now that we know the requirements, we can start the plan. What ECE has done is, they've created a framework so that we have some continuity across the territory, we have a common framework to go by. Schools are now creating plans to open schools and abide by the orders of...

I'm not sure if the Member is speaking about students who don't have access to computers. In those cases, students have relationships with their teachers and, right down to the level of teacher and student, there was outreach. Teacher have done their best to connect with every student and ensure that every student has the opportunity to learn. In a number of locations in the Deh Cho, and I believe up in the Beaufort-Delta, as well, there were initiatives to distribute computers, Chromebooks. There were other jurisdictions where they were lending out their equipment. In communities where...

I request a recorded vote.

In the data that we have, you can break it down by age. You see the number of people in each age group who speak a language. Clearly, the percentage of speakers in the older group, 75 plus, for example, is much, much higher than in the younger groups. We have that data in a sense. I think that what the Member is looking for might be a little too administratively burdensome to find, but we have a general sense.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member referenced the data described by the Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with Education, Culture and Employment. That is compiled every five years and it's by community, and it shows the number of speakers in each community. The 2019 survey results will be out in the summer of 2020, and those results have some more fine-tuned data, including interest in language. So we can find out how many people are learning the language or want to learn the language, and we can move forward that way. There are also efforts to collect language data from education...