EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
His question on ‘What size of sealskin should be purchased,’ I don’t have that information at hand, but they sell the skins through auctioneers down south.
Perhaps the minister can table the policies or regulations on what the quality of sealskins has to be and on the size and quality of the skin.
Perhaps, he could table the regulations or policies for that.
Yes, I can table that document under “Tabling of Documents”.
Going back orders of the day. Item 7. Item 8.
Item 11. Item 12.
Tabled Document 077 – 2(2): Photographs on the Condition of Spark Plugs
Today, I am tabling some photographs from my community that reveal the bad condition of spark plugs in the community of Arctic Bay.  The photographs show when the ski-doo is running, an exhaust is black where the ski-doo is running.
Back to Orders of the Day. Item 15.
Tabled Document 52-2(2) and Bill 8.
Mr. Netser in the Chair.
We will take 20 minute break.
Sergent-at-Arms.
>>House recessed at 15:22 and resumed at 15:54
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming back.
I would like to call this Committee of the Whole meeting to order.
In the Committee of the Whole we have the following items to deal with: Tabled document 52-2(2); and Bill 8.
Mr. Peterson: Mr. Chairman, we wish to continue with the review of Bill 1 and the Main Estimates for the Department of Education.
Does the Committee agree that Minister Picco and his staff go to the witness table?
Chairman: Mr. Picco, you can proceed to the witness table.
Thank you, Mr. Minister. For the record, can you refresh our memory and introduce your staff?
Joining me at the table today on my immediate right is Ms. Hine, Deputy Minister of Education, and on my immediate left is Janis Mopps, Director of Finance and Corporate Comptroller for the Department of Education.
Chairman (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Picco and your staff.
We are on Page G – 5.
Yesterday, I had Mr. Tootoo on my list.
I am at a loss for the Homelessness Secretariat contribution.
I am going to leave that for now, and just ask, the minister has indicated at one time contributions to DEA, the $100,000 that was taken at this year’s budget, can he indicate on any specific projects that were, that the funds were used for?
Mr. Chairman, as we were saying yesterday the $100,000 had been allocated in the budget last year and it was for issues around special needs.
That was above and beyond that was funded within the budget of the Department of Education.
There had been no budget for 2003-2004 and it actually appeared in the Main Estimates of 2004-2005 for that special reason.
In this budget I think there is over $2 million dedicated and when we get in that page in the budget then we can have some good discussions on it, specifically for special needs in Nunavut.
This would have been one off money, the $100,000.
Out of the budget of over $180 million is less than 1/10th of one percent.
That was again monies allocated based on special needs within the Territory.
It could have been remedial reading in community, and so on.
If it wasn’t that much, I am sure the minister can provide us with a list on what that money was used for.
We will make that available to the member.
Any further question Mr. Tootoo?
Again, it deals with the Homeless Secretariat.
I know the Minister of Education is the homelessness minister, I know that federally under the Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation and that whole area.
I know a word that the Minister as the former Health minister was using quite a bit, was this continuum of care.
At the federal level they seem to want to try and keep this entire spectrum, you know your homeless to your houses all under one umbrella.
I’m just wondering if there is any thought of this government doing this same thing and if the Homeless Secretariat is falling under the housing corporation.
It was announced last year, the staff housing was in Public Works and Services before, and it was given to or handed back to the Housing Corporation now, for that exact same thing, of trying to keep everything similar together.
I’m just wondering if that’s something that there’s been any thought of on here to try and make better use of available resources.
Last year, we had a half PY position that we were able to fund in conjunction with the housing corporation for the issue around homelessness.
The monies for homelessness come directly in our case as a jurisdiction for the Federal Government and it comes through HRDC.
I must say for the record that Mary Jane Adamson who is the local operative for the federal department here in Nunavut, based in Iqaluit, has done the yeoman service on the file for Nunavutmiut.
So, it makes sense because of the other interactions that we have with HRDC under education to coordinate that funding of the $100,000 under this ministry.
Again, it’s because I’m the minister responsible. It would be difficult for me to give instructions, for example, to one of the other ministers, the Minister of Housing, to give their staff instruction on issues when we already have a housing minister.
So the Premier, when he set up the position and portfolio, again, it’s the only jurisdiction in the country other than the federal government to have one; it was to deal with issues at the time around the homeless shelter and because the federal government was moving in a way to deal with the issue of homelessness on a national level.
Now we’ve progressed in the last four years to the point where we’ve actually targeted about $100,000 that we would use for grants and contributions to support homelessness and homelessness initiatives in Nunavut.
I would like further clarification in respect to the trades’ policy.
Could the minister indicate to us if he will be tabling a report or giving us a report back once it’s completed?
We heard very good comments yesterday but is it possible for the minister to report to us once that’s finished?
I would make that commitment to report back.
Total operations and maintenance, $1,222,000.
Chairman: Go to G-7.
Policy and planning.
Total operations and maintenance. $982,000.
Chairman: Go to G-9.
Oh, I’m sorry.
This is an area that the minister had indicated that dealing with the legislation and with the funding formula development and stuff like that.
And also, with their new research and policy, strategic planning and coordination branches of the department.
I am just going back to your Business Plan.
Here, the policy and planning seven PYs, it is the same as last year; one person in legislation, two in Corporate Communications and four Directors in the Director’s office; a total of seven.
Here, is this where the main work on developing the new Education Act, that is going to be coming out of division within the department?
The policy and planning branch of any department can govern; it is probably one of the most crucial and important.
It looks at and analyzes detailed information in regards to direction that is given by either the Minister, by the government and by members.
It looks at upcoming trends.
It tries to project the way things are going in a federal, national or a territorial level, again to be able to move that department within that timeframe and the work done by the policy people is very important.
Yes, the department, the policy and planning branch of the department has the responsibility for planning and consulting, as well as doing the analytical work, as well as a lot of the administrative work on the research and coordination for the legislative proposal which includes in this case the Education Act.
There is a lot of reviewing, for example, issues around the PVT training school that we talked about before, the Folk School, and so on.
So that type of direction comes from the policy and planning branch of the department.
Is this area also the area that came up with the changes that were going to be in the funding formula for the schools?
What has occurred in the School Funding Formula is the consultative work that has gone on with the local DEAs with the Education Advisory Committee that I have appointed to the Minister and input from the members here, for example and teachers across Nunavut.
That work is coordinated by the policy branch.
It is referred to the school section of our department, the budget that would be the K – 12 sections.
What section is that?
School operations, it is on Page G – 19.
That is where we would have the information on the funding formula, so that is where impact would be, at K – 12, so it would be G – 19.
Here the policy and planning the member is correct.
The legislative framework, for example, for the Education Act would be developed and proposed here.
And then the analyzing of the analytical data when we go into the community consultations would be performed within the policy and planning branch.
The minister also indicated that in here, they do the research and analytical work for trends and things like that for the department.
I would like to just thank the Minister for his very substantive response to my written question, albeit the format leaves a little bit to be desired.
It doesn’t really show you anything page by page like that.
I am very pleased that he is able to provide that information.
I know that sometimes requests for detailed information may seem trivial, or we just want to see if you can do it or something like that.
In fact, it is an important step in working together to try and address some of our most pressing needs.
Just a comment, I would suggest when the ministers do provide answers to written questions, that they would probably provide greater clarity if those questions were referred to the formally tabled document, rather than referring to unedited Hansard for the wording and spelling of the question.
Mr. Chairman, the department’s policy and planning branch provides services including research, policy development, planning and development on standards, and so on and so forth.
And therefore and thus, I would like to ask the Minister how the data collected on the drop out and truancy rates are being used to identify trends or patterns across Nunavut schools.
Based on my scan of the raw numbers, it appears that some schools are more successful than others in keeping students in school.
I think it’s important that we learn from our success stories where things are working and where they’re not and try and develop models based on practises that do work.
I’ve noted that there seems to be some general trends in these numbers.
For example, when you look through the pages, I noticed that Grade 10 seems to be a really difficult time for a lot of students across Nunavut.
What is it about grade 10 for example, that seems to lead to a peak in the percentages of students playing hooky or dropping out of school.
Maybe the Minister can respond to that, if he can.
Mr. Chairman, under the policy and planning branch, the member is correct; we try to ascertain what the trend lines are.
So, in this case the member is talking about a cohort of students at Grade 10 and across the board in Nunavut we have seen an attrition rate, especially when you get to 9, 10, 11 and 12.
That’s where the highest drop out rate or attrition rate is occurring.
I said earlier, for every 100 children that enter school in Nunavut at Kindergarten, only 25 will graduate with grade 12.
That’s an attrition rate or a drop out rate of almost 75%.
It has been slowly improving but the numbers are not that well moved forward enough to be able to be reflective in a position way.
I think that would be safe to say.
So, what has occurred here is that when the trends are brought forward and they have been, and the member has seen them, is that each regional office of the Department of Education reviews those and then we try to find the specific reasons and so on.
So there is a lot of work that goes on amongst that.
The other part of this of course falls into the legislative side.
There have been a lot of issues raised under the Education Act on how we actually deal with truancy and then attrition and the ages and so on.
That was one of the stumbling blocks the member may remember in the last Education Act, when we looked at what was the age of consent of the child when they wanted to drop out of school themselves.
What were the penalties and fines that were in place for truancy?
All of those types of things are being collated and correlated and then you move forward with the process for the Education Act, as well as trying to determine what those trend lines are.
We know what the trend lines are because the member has just pointed out that in Grade 10 you can see a high truancy rate.
I’m just wondering that if they do look at this information and analyse it and try and solve it, you know the Minister had indicated that they, and the old Bill 1, that they came out with different kinds of penalties and ages and things like that, when kids drop out of school, but after looking as the Minister would say, dealing with it right here, we need to go upstream.
Not deal with them after they’re gone.
Does the Minister’s staff have any idea?
Has anyone looked at if we know that that’s why we’re losing the majority of our students? Why is it?
Does the Minister or his staff have any indication as to why it seems to be peaking at that rate?
That is not an easy question to answer.
What we like to be able to do is have an upstream approach.
And getting into an analogy before in the House, where a lot of people think downstream.
That is where the body is floating, down the river.
You try and take the bodies down the river and find out why they have died.
We have to go up the river and stop them in following down the river.
That is the upstream approach that we like to take.
In this case there are several different reasons that have been identified for drop-outs.
Parental support at home, peer pressure, on the students themselves, disinterest in the programs that are offered in the schools and other opportunities they may have found themselves in the community.
There is a whole range of issues around truancy, and so on.
So when we held meetings and held meetings with the District Education Authorities and the Chairs, one of the things that have been coming up are issues around truancies and attritions.
That is something we hope to deal with, again stronger in way of the legislative way of the Education Act.
On the greater side again with the local District Education Authority on how they deal with it at the local level.
Again, those elected officials have a better feel for what is happening in their schools and recommendations that they bring forward would be implemented by that school to look at the issue.
I think I might be of the opinion when they are at Grade 10 that is already down river.
The problem seems to be when you want to go upstream from that, you have to look at the lower level grades and make sure that the students are prepared to take on the higher challenges in the high schools.
I believe it is given to the Grade 10 level in school that you are strictly into the Alberta curriculum.
They are higher standards about what you have to know and what you can do.
I have met with the District Education Authority here and they tell me they have kids in high school that are illiterate that come up through the system locally and are shoved into high school illiterate.
You wonder why they drop out if you are not given the tools that you need to be there.
That has got to be pretty demoralizing and demeaning for the poor kids.
They feel bad about themselves because they don’t know how to do it and these other kids can.
So my question to the Minister is, what are you going to do to try and curb that upstream if not at the Grade10 level but before they have to get there?
So, what plan does the department have to try and address this issue so that we don’t have illiterate children, at no fault of their own, set up to fail by the system, to be able to succeed at the high school level?
That is where some focus needs to be made on is how we can address the problem.
Why are we having kids entering into high school that can’t read?
There is something wrong here.
I would like to get a response from the Minister on that.
There are several reasons why a child would enter Grade 10 and not be able to compete at the academic stream. It is a fallacy to say that every child when they go to Grade 9, 10, 11 and 12 doing the Alberta curriculum, that is not the case.
There are multiple graduation options within our schools.
We don’t expect every student to be academically inclined and be able to do X number of things.
However, after saying that, our teachers have been doing their very best.
We’ve had some fantastic successes in education in Nunavut in the past, especially in the past several years.
For the first time ever, we’ve graduated our first nurses this past spring with degrees.
These nurses can nurse anywhere in Canada.
For the first time ever this spring, we’ll be graduating our first trained lawyers, trained and educated right here in Nunavut.
We have the first Inuk ever, attending Harvard University, one of the best schools in the world, in the United States.
Right now we have hundreds, literally hundreds of students in the south, Inuit students, Nunavut students attending post-secondary education.
We’ve got a lot of good things to be proud of in Nunavut.
However, a teacher only has a student for five hours a day.
One of the biggest issues we see and continue to see is when a student comes to school and they haven’t been able to get a good night sleep, if they’re hungry, if there’s issues at home, how do you expect that child to be able to learn?
What this budget does to address a lot of the things that the member is talking about and I’m not disagreeing with him, I am in agreement with him, is we’re putting more money into remedial education and to special needs.
We catch those issues at Kindergarten, Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, where they’re learning issues and special needs issues with the students and that helps them get the academia that need to continue on to be successful.
However, you can have the best education system in the world but if you’re not providing that support at home, the best teacher in the world is not really going to be able to accomplish more than what they can do for that five hours a day.
School and education is a partnership between the government, the school and the parents, and most importantly, the student.
I think it’s about time in Nunavut that we start looking at some of those issues and encourage our students to stay in school.
That’s why I say when you get to Grade, 9, 10, 11, and students find some other things to do, part of it may be because of issues around the academics but as the member said earlier, if it starts earlier, and that’s why we’re saying that we’re front loading money into special needs in this budget.
It will have a huge impact on our communities across Nunavut to be able to deal with some of those issues.
So, I hope that helps answer the member’s question.
I guess, as the Minister pointed out, I’m not saying that you can take a look at some of the people in this room, that Inuit aren’t intelligent.
They are probably some of the smartest people around that I know.
If they are given the opportunity to learn, I really believe that our system, I’m not saying the system is 100 percent responsible, but the way our system is set up for setting our kids up for failure.
I think that we have to admit that and look at trying to address it instead of saying we’ve got all of these wonderful success stories and things are getting better.
Even while that’s going on, we have high school students that can’t read.
So, I think that we don’t try and put a different spin on it for something that isn’t there.
The problem is still there and it needs to be dealt with.
Mr. Chairman, I’m sorry for going off on that but again, going back to response to the written question that the Minister provided, and certain trends are sorted out according to gender.
I think that shows an important aspect of how our society is evolving especially when we compare this information to other information broken down by gender such as employment statistics or suicide attempts.
Can the Minister tell us whether the Research Division of its policy and planning branch will be analysing this information and developing strategies to address these findings?
Just under the member’s comments on students going into high school and they are illiterate, there are definitions for literacy and illiteracy.
A good example is if you look at the standard norms across Canada and in the United States right now, almost 20 percent of university entries, people who have graduated Grade 12 and who have applied to university had to do remedial upgrading programs in English and Math as a fact.
That’s not to say that the education system has collapsed across Canada or the United States to say that.
What I am suggesting to you is that the partnership has to begin at the home and that in a lot of cases when we look at the teaching in the classroom, the basic academic surveyor.
However, the student needs extra support, and maybe the extra supports are needed outside of the classroom.
I believe there is a lot of success going on.
What I am trying to say when I show you how many graduates have graduated, these are the people that have been successful through the education system whether they are from Coral Harbour, from Cambridge Bay or from Iqaluit.
That’s what we should be proud of.
If those people can make it through, then so can our other students, but there may be some special needs that need to be presented at those lower levels like the member has said.
That’s why in this budget for the first time; we are dedicating a huge part of the money within the budget itself when we go further on into the budget for special needs, which will have an impact across all of our schools in Nunavut.
That will deal with some of the issues around remedial education to help on the literacy side of things.
So I think that’s important to point out when we look at the success or failure of a system.
On the written question component, the member is again correct.
There was a lot of detail asked for in the written question and I want to thank the staff, one of our senior policy analysts right now, Mr. Mark McKay is there with us.
I would like to suggest that Mark and his guys worked many, many hours and had to contact all of the different schools and then the District Education Authorities to get the information asked for in the written question formed by the House before Christmas.
So I would like to thank him for that.
Mr. Tootoo your time is up, I have two names here and you can speak after them if you wish.
Mr. Curley: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was curious about some of the unilingual students that may be recommended for high school when they couldn’t read.
If that’s a fact, I would like to ask the Minister if you would table that information publicly so we can deal with it.
It has been very hard for me to try and accept it in the Assembly that there are students in high school that can’t read.
I know number one, there are many students in high school that can’t read Inuktitut nor speak Inuktitut, even some of the majority of the public, some of them are in this Chamber too that can’t speak and read in Inuktitut.
I have never heard of anyone that is put into high school who can’t read.
If so, could you table those figures for us, whether it would be a report to the House?
I think this is a very serious charge to say that we have students in high school that can’t read English nor Inuktitut.
Would you be prepared to table that report, if any, so that we can address it?
In the last count we had over 8,700 students in 42 schools across Nunavut, when you look at that number that is a lot of bodies in a lot of schools.
I am not aware of any data, documentation, letter or any official format to me as Minister of Education, that said in a given school, in a community, in Hard Luck Bay, Nunavut, seven people in Grade 11, or seven people in Grade 12, or one person in Grade 10 has been put in that Grade and can’t read or write.