Robert Hawkins

Mr. Speaker, I’m going to have questions for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment regarding some of this Junior Kindergarten stuff, just to follow up with some of the problems that we’ve talked about to date and certainly issues I’ve raised before.

I was speaking to two parents yesterday with grave concerns about this, because they had gone to an invitation at, I believe, our museum to talk about the impacts on day home operators, and the senior official said that, yes, you might lose a third of your income, but if you were better budgeters you would notice very little change.

Is...

Mr. Speaker, I would like to know what the Department of Transportation is going to do when it comes to finding out if we have any holdbacks on this particular work at this time and what are we going to do when we need to address these in the future. Quite frankly, a northern company that has investments here, that has employees hired here that wanted to do this particular work lost the job because the southern business lowballed them and it seems like we are going back to fix the work that they lowballed a northern company.

Are we at a financial risk or a legal risk in this situation because...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just want to pick up a little bit on one of the subjects Member Dolynny raised with the Deh Cho Bridge. Of course, I’ll be directing them, obviously, to the Minister of Transportation.

More than a year ago, I was raising with the former Minister of Transportation a concern about the electrical contractor, how he was quite proud about the fact that the southern contractor met the expectations of the contract, and of course, we had to award it to the southern contractor because they were cheaper. Of course, they met the standards of everything that they had asked for in...

Thank you. So, go to the website; interesting answer. As I brought up before, the website says send all correspondence through the president’s office. So the president gets to handle, control who knows what with the information. So the direct contact and accountability, what is the Minister afraid of to tell them to provide them with an Aurora College e-mail address because if they’re on the Board of Governors, they’re there as an advisory board, they’re there as an administrative board, or are they there for whatever reason? I don’t know. Maybe the Minister will take that initiative on and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On February 5, 2014, I’d asked the Minister of Education to use some of his authority under Section 7 of the Aurora College Act. I asked him to tell the Aurora College Board of Governors to meet the students and certainly provide some e-mail addresses so people can contact them, but rather, they still appear to be anonymous. Perhaps they like it that way in a sense of governance of the board and the college for the students.

I want to hear what updates the Minister can provide the House immediately to find out has he actually done anything. Thank you.

See, Mr. Speaker, you’re so correct, because this is such a frustrating issue. I happen to look at all of them, and they all look the same because they all give the same answers: nothing.

The Education Minister is the one I’m, frankly, pointing at right now. Thank you for pointing that out. Frankly, has the Education Minister ever had the courage to come to the committee or the Assembly to ask for money to properly fund this program from the start, because I don’t know how he’s going to do more with less money.

Let me thank Robin Hood over there for that answer. I want to know from the Minister, is he in a position to fund all Yellowknife school boards at 100 percent, because it’s unfair that in Yellowknife the citizens are double taxed. For the education of anybody following this issue, you pay through your property tax and then that money can go to the school boards where it doesn’t apply elsewhere in the Northwest Territories. The citizens of Yellowknife are being double taxed on this issue. Is he prepared to fund them properly, 100 percent?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rose my hand to do the same thing Mr. Bromley just did, but certainly it’s worth noting once again. I’d like to, as well, recognize Weledeh constituent John McFadden, citizen.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t know how you get more with less money, and he’s spreading this around. But all of this problem really began, this epic journey, all the narrative of when the Department of Education gag ordered the superintendents in the fall, so none of us really knew what was happening, so maybe let’s start getting to the bottom of this issue by working backwards.

We’ve talked about how we got here through the process of funding, how we’re getting there and the problems. What about the problem about gagging the superintendents from the start on this particular issue? Why would...

But the fact is, that’s not a straight line funding formula. He has one for the communities, and then he has one for the regional centres, and he’s got ones for Yellowknife. By the way, you have a large funding formula for the communities – which I support because it’s important – and I certainly say the fact is the problem is he’s taking from the large centre of Yellowknife to fund them. He should be asking for money.

By the way, on that note, has the Justice Minister ever had the courage to come to committee or the Assembly, for that matter, and ask for the proper money and funding to fund JK...