Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today I talked about realizing the dream of ending poverty in the Northwest Territories through a guaranteed income pilot. These programs are not just about alleviating poverty, but reducing government expense by cutting costly social security programs and rolling the costs back into this program, empowering Northerners and people with a guaranteed income that will allow them to take ownership over their decision-making. Does the Minister responsible for our social security system, the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, support guaranteed income as a policy position? Thank you.
Masi. Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can assure Members of this House that our department is closely monitoring the three-year Ontario pilot project that the Member talked about in his opening statement. We are looking at the implementation, and we do look forward to seeing those results. In the meantime, we have done initiatives. We have created action plans. Just recently this past year we made changes to the Canada Child Benefit, as well as the NWT Child Benefit, to try to give every family in the Northwest Territories the opportunity to be part of their communities, the economy, as well as to meet their basic needs. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
It is good to know the government is paying attention to that project. As the Minister knows, I am a big fan of putting more money into the pockets of Northerners. At this point, is the department considering developing a pilot project for one of our small northern communities? I am thinking about those non-tax-based communities, where people do not have market conditions to support them. We could really make a big difference by raising them to the level that our tax-based communities enjoy. Is the Minister willing to the look into developing a pilot for one of those communities?
Currently, we are not looking at a pilot project of guaranteed basic income, but as I have mentioned, we are looking to see what the results are coming out of the Ontario pilot project.
I appreciate where the Minister is coming from, and we want to make evidence-based decisions, but we have that example of what happened in Dauphin, Manitoba. It was an astounding success for projects like this. That was a $17 million project, and the federal government funded 75 per cent of that. It is well within the reach of our government to ask to pilot something like that, and it would be a much smaller scale. Instead of waiting, you know, a couple years until we see what happens in Ontario, why not break some ground on this and move forward? It seems like it is the way of the future.
I think the dollar back in the seventies was a lot different from the dollar of today, and also the fact that we have made increases as well, such as the Small Community Employment Support Program. That is one where we were trying to address some of these areas to help families, to help people get working, become part of the workforce. We continue to make changes to policies so that more families get more money in their pockets at the end of the day as well. We are still continuing to work to address those issues through strategies, initiatives, the Anti-Poverty Strategy, for one, and the Small Community Employment initiatives that we have initiated over this past year.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Kam Lake.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, I applaud the government for moving forward on all those projects. They are crucially important, but with things like the Small Community Employment Support program, it is a wage subsidy. This dispenses with subsidies. It dispenses with payments that are monitored. You will not get any income clawed back. This is a revolutionary policy that could transform how we address poverty in our society. Again, I urge the Minister to commit to taking real action on this by working to develop a pilot project. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
We are committed to continuing to work with families across the Northwest Territories to make sure that they have enough funds to meet their basic needs. What I cannot commit to at this moment is looking at a pilot project in one of the communities. We will continue to work with our partners, our non-government organizations, other departments within the government, to ensure that families have the resources to meet their basic needs, but at this moment I am not committed to looking at a pilot. Thank you.
Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife Centre.
