Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. So on Friday, the Minister committed to publicly releasing a report on the community learning centres, completed just last year, that was based on a set of community consultations that assessed how well the community learning centres were working and what could be done better. So can the Minister confirm whether in those consultations, did communities recommend that the community learning centres be shut down, or did they provide suggestions for more innovative and effective approaches to adult education programming? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I can confirm that this afternoon those reports are now online and as soon as I stop answering questions, I'll be able to send an email to my colleagues to let them know those links. So, Mr. Speaker, there -- to start, there was a facilities master plan that was released by the GNWT in September of 2022. In April of 2024, there was community learning centre reports, along with What We Heard reports, that were commissioned by the GNWT and also community learning centres facilities report. These reports, Mr. Speaker, did not identify the closure of community learning centres as part of their recommendations. They did identify things like flexibility, variety of programming, and being responsive to community needs as some of the preferences and suggestions, and then they also did talk about different projected enrolments, staffing models, financial capacity. So there was a variety of things that the reports did explore, and I look forward to providing those links both to Members of this House, and I can commit to also putting them on my Facebook page. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Minister for confirming that, in fact, the actions taken by the college went against what communities had been saying in the consultations about the CLCs.
What has the Minister heard from organizations other than Aurora College, such as Indigenous governments or development corporations, the literacy council or Dechinta, regarding their interest in offering the kind of adult education to fill the gap being left by Aurora College? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, at this point I don't have specifics to share, but I mean, certainly there's been interest in everything from filling the space in its entirety or filling parts of the space. There's also been interest in using some of the facilities for something different that might speak to some of the needs in communities. So this has certainly started a lot of buzz and conversation about what the future of not only adult learning in communities looks like but also future uses of these facilities, which I think is really interesting, because I think it's important that we do use this as an opportunity and be creative in what the next chapter looks like. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. Final supplementary. Member from Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And so on the related subject of family-based literacy programming, what is ECE doing to promote family- based literacy and learning instead of just school-based learning, or has this fallen off the radar with the introduction of junior kindergarten and the focus on childcare? Thank you.
So, colleagues, that's a different line of questioning where we started off so I'm going to go to -- do you have another question with CLCs? Member from Yellowknife North.
Okay. Can the Minister confirm what will be the next steps in terms of her interaction with Aurora College to help sort out what parts of this adult education space Aurora College still wants to continue filling? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, at this point we're working with Aurora College to really gain clarity on what the picture will look like, and our actions from there will be to determine how we go about working with our education partners and stakeholders across the territory to ensure that at the end of the day we still are providing options for adult education and opportunities for education and employment in our small communities across the territory. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. Oral questions. Member from Inuvik Boot Lake.
