Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Just recently we had a bunch of graduation ceremonies through our three campuses in the Aurora College throughout the NWT. I’ll just read off some numbers for you here. We had 84 in Yellowknife at the Yellowknife Campus, 41 at the campus in Fort Smith, and a whopping 16 in Inuvik. Something is wrong here with the numbers and it’s not because we’re not getting the enrollments into the school, it’s because we’re not putting the programs where the programs are needed within the communities that are asking for them.
We have great facilities in the community of Inuvik at the Aurora College and we have an excellent staff. However, I’m very concerned about the future and the success of the Aurora College campus.
The government needs to focus and support by investing in our students, in our families, in our organizations and the communities who want to build capacity within our northern society. In fact, just earlier today we heard from the Economic Development Strategy that people are essential. We cannot advance our economy without a growing, healthy population.
Furthermore, it says a thriving economy is one made up of healthy, educated people. We’ve heard reports; we’ve heard news reports in the NWT that we can’t meet our needs within the diamond mine industry because we don’t have the skilled labour workforce. Well, we can do something about that. We can start investing in our Aurora College programs not only in certain areas such as in Yellowknife where we have a lot of diamond industries, let’s look north, let’s look north to the Aurora College campus where we have a lot of students that come from the Sahtu and the Beaufort-Delta region that are going to be impacted with all of the big projects we have on the horizon.
Such projects as the fibre optic link, the satellite stations, Inuvik-Tuk highway, Mackenzie Valley Highway, offshore drilling, everything that’s been said over the last 19 months that we’ve been sitting in the House. The government, the Minister, his department, the board of directors of the Aurora College have a great opportunity here to invest in the Inuvik region and the Sahtu region, by putting more programs in the Aurora College campus to create local capacity so that we have local people leading the way for all these projects that we have on the horizon.
I will have questions for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment later today. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
