Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wish, like my other colleagues, I could quote from Mr. Roland’s finance budget delivery address earlier today, but, unfortunately, I can’t quote what isn’t there. That is, we don’t have a plan to hire our northern teaching graduates.

Mr. Speaker, we are all well aware of former Premier Kakfwi’s grand promise to provide all northern graduates of recognized teaching programs with employment. Well, Mr. Speaker, those were nice words back in those days, which were only a couple years ago, as a priority, but the reality is that those graduates out there are not getting jobs that they were lead to believe they would get when they finished. Mr. Speaker, thank goodness Moody’s hasn’t done a credit rating on our promises or our priorities because we wouldn’t have gotten an AA3 rating for promises.

We’ve been hearing a lot about how difficult it is to recruit teachers to our northern communities, but it’s pretty hard for an average person to understand why our education authorities aren’t jumping at the chance to hire our northern grads. Where is the difficulty, Mr. Speaker? Is it a lack of will on the part of the education authorities? Is it a communication gap where the students aren’t informed about these available jobs? Or is it the education authorities aren’t informed about the available grads? What is the problem, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Speaker, I can’t imagine how discouraging it must be for recent grads of the education programs to see jobs taken up by southern hires and not their northern friends. While the northern grads are getting by, they are getting casual substituting teaching jobs and taking jobs in other fields, and that must be significantly disappointing.

I realize education authorities are responsible directly for hiring their own teachers and employees, but the government has a responsibility to live up to a promise that they made. Where is the action plan to that promise? We need to get our house in order with this particular problem, Mr. Speaker. Somebody has to be monitoring the numbers. Get out there with the education authorities; find out what is really happening and why we are doing this. Are we burying our heads in the sand, or in the snow, in this particular case? Are we pretending that, for this big successful concept of an initiative, the promises were made, are we ignoring that we have something unique to deliver? I think we’re failing, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, these graduates work hard, very hard to get where they are today. We made a promise to them; they made a promise to want to teach our children here in the North. Is this government letting this promise go by the wayside? Why was this promise never fulfilled? We need to fill our education authorities and implement this promise by using our authority. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause