EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
First of all, the Education Act is probably one of the most important pieces of legislation this Assembly is going to try to bring forward in this term. Just to update the members, we have completed all the community consultations and we have, as the members are aware of, a process that involves the local education authorities, the district education authorities as well as Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated as signatories to the land claim, involved in a steering committee.
We are in the process right now of checking off sections of the Act to ensure that we have agreement or consensus on them. One example that we don’t have consensus on is the Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated position of moving forward with re-establishing the Education Boards.
As the members are aware the cabinet and the government has said that that’s not on the table.
So when there is a dispute, there is a dispute resolution mechanism in place and that dispute resolution mechanism is to meet again as a group if there is no consensus on that, to bring it forward to ultimately to go back to the cabinet for a decision.
Right now I would suggest to you that we have about 70 percent of the Act agreed to; there are about 30 percent outstanding issues.
We are trying to, over the next six or seven weeks, to get consensus on those.
After that’s complete then the instructions go to the drafters of the legislation and from there the drafting of the legislation would become a bill, and then the legislation would be introduced.
I am still working toward having that introduction sometime at the end of May, the first week of June, that’s our goal right now.
As the members have said in the House we want to make sure that when we bring that bill forward that it’s the best bill that we have to do it. So I don’t want to rush the legal drafter. I don’t want to get into pushing a decision for that timeline because I still have the file to bring forward.
Two questions remain on the timing. The number one question on timing is when I bring it forward in June to do first and second reading that means that it would be referred to the committee.
Would the committee hold hearings in July and August?
Or would they wait until September? Would it be better for me to bring it forward in the October session and then the members would then have then an opportunity to have hearings after that in the fall, and in the winter.
So those are the types of things when we get to that point we would have to look at, as the minister and the department, but also with the Cabinet.
I knew that earlier that you have your work cut out for yourself with all these huge issues.
I think we need to help in defining exactly what we mean by regional boards, or local boards, or school boards.
I am not 100 percent sure what we’re talking about when school boards are being talked about. I have never seen local schools boards in my life in Nunavut.
I assume we’re talking about regional boards, is that what you’re alluding to?
What Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated wants to do? Because we have to be very clear that we have never had local school boards in communities.
I don’t know what we have right now. Could the minister outline what it is that we do have in the communities?
Maybe that’ll help me with the meaning of regional boards.
If the district educational authorities are not school boards, why is it that they don’t have that distinction?
I think what the terminology is being used is that in the past we used to have three regional education boards; in the Baffin, the Kivalliq, and Kitikmeot.
The member is correct. It wasn’t a regional board, as such when we talk about school boards in the traditional sense, for example, the Yellowknife School District Number One, which the member would be very familiar with. That’s not what we have at the community level; we have regional boards.
There has been some move, as I suggested earlier, to bring back the three regional boards and that’s not something that we’re inclined to do as a government.
Mr. Curley: Thank you. That clarifies my question that regional boards will not come back, nor will the local school boards be established.
What are we going to have since we won’t have regional control? We won’t have local school boards.
What is it then that we will have in our communities if the new Act is finally tabled in the House?
Of course, we’re trying to develop that right now with the Education Act.
Right now under the current Education Act every community has a district education authority, which is the duly elected body representing the community itself.
Under the current Education Act the district education authority sets the hours of school instruction, sets the language of instruction, on bad days weather days close the schools, are involved in private contracting.
For example, they may have a contract to provide school bussing services, and so on. In actuality, in an ex officio way they act as a school board.
Under the current enabling legislation they have all the powers of a district education authority.
What we’re trying to do in the new Education Act is to provide more opportunities to take over more responsibility for education at the local level.
That may include, for example, terms and conditions of the school itself, looking at more involvement in the hiring practices at the school. There are things that the local DEAs have asked for.
One of the things we don’t want to move towards is to duplicate efforts. So for example, we don’t want to have a position where you would have a DEA in Clyde River advertising for teachers and principals competing against the DEA in Pond Inlet, competing against Igloolik, competing with Whale Cove, and so on, there are no economies in scale in doing that.
What we want to be able to do is facilitate more community empowerment and not community encumbering the education authority.
I think we’re getting more and more consensus on that.
At the same time we have helped set up the DEA Coalition, which is a forum for all the DEAs in Nunavut to act in an advocacy role for DEA concerns and issues that they would be able to present in that forum.
Mr. Curley: Yes, I appreciate the minister’s comments. I have part of the clarification that I want because there have been local DEAs that are to have certain responsibilities as the minister indicated, you know setting out the schools and those other categories.
Why is it that the local school DEAs are not authorized to hire teachers, or recruit them?
The DEAs right now, and have been for a considerable amount of time, are involved in the early aspects of the hiring of teachers.
They have someone from the DEA who would be involved in the hiring process; the screening of the applicants, and so on.
What the DEA doesn’t have is the authority to pay the teachers, meaning when they hire teachers from the south they don’t have the logistic, or the administrative, or the financial ability in most cases to be able to facilitate that. That includes ensuring that the collective agreements that are in place, whether it’s with the NEU or with NTA, that the Public Service Act is followed and so on.
The involvement of the recruitment, and so on, of teachers is carried out at the local level and DEAs are involved.
However, they don’t actually facilitate the intricacies of the administrative process of payments and so on of the employees.
So it leads to my second point that you appear to be saying that you are affording the community empowerment but how can you really empower communities if you don’t provide that through legislation and policy?
The member has raised what the crux of the problem is here, or maybe a bit of a disagreement.
What we’re saying is that we believe, I believe as minister, the government believes that stronger DEAs means stronger education, it means stronger communities.
So I want to move forward to be able to empower DEAs to do a lot of the things that they have been asking for. However, I don’t want to get to the position of encumbering them.
So for example, if I put in the legislation, in the Act, that all DEAs will hire and fire all teachers, for example, and will be in charge of the superannuation, would be making the deductions, and so on and so forth, you would have 25 payment agencies in 25 different Nunavut communities. And, a lot of communities may not have the ability; may not have the human resource people, the HR people, to be able to interpret a collective agreement; may not have the person to be able to cut the cheques, and so on.
So what I’m proposing to do with the legislation, and this is some of the discussion that we have, is that whatever is in the Act, I would have enabling legislation. And what that would mean is that let’s say the DEA in Rankin Inlet wrote to the minister and said, “Minister, we have the financial resources and the human resources to be able to be involved in the hiring processes. We would like to take on more of that responsibility.”
So in the Act, it would be enabling because the DEA would be able to write me and say, “This is what we would like to do.” We would be able to say, “Okay. Based on what you have available in Rankin Inlet you can take on those extra duties.”
Grise Fiord, being the smaller community, may not want to have that responsibility, and of course, if they wrote us, they may not have the human resources and the capacity to do that.
So that would still allow the check and balance to make sure that all the schools in the communities are on an equal footing.
That is the direction we are taking right now. That is not in place in the Act right now, the member is correct.
That is not there and that is one of the things we are trying to do through the legislative process and the new Education Act. It would empower communities with that opportunity.
Mr. Curley: I appreciate the minister’s response.
Again, that leads to the question why, I suppose we will have to see exactly what the community empowerment means as well as offloading some of the community and educational responsibility to local.
I cannot ever really understand that we would do that without a legal basis to off load programs because surely there is such thing as transferring personnel from the government to local. You just explained to us why should the DEA take on more responsibility they don’t have.
It really depends on which ones you are transferring.
You have the authority to transfer the personnel to those local DEAs like Iqaluit.
Why should the communities that are able be prevented from doing so in carrying out the full aspects?
For instance, the economies of scale used are normally, we understand when you are able and have the capacity to do so, you are given that ability. For instance, Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet, Cambridge Bay and other communities are probably getting to the point where they can be given a whole lot more authority but why would you keep them from doing so because communities like Grise Fiord are not ready?
These communities are really not comparable to a place that is more advanced.
They are prepared to take on the burden that the Department of Education is carrying right now and I am surprised that you still are defending the central control instead of local control.
I would like the minister to explain why should Iqaluit or Rankin Inlet be held back because one of the smaller communities is not quite at that level yet?
It is interesting to hear what the member is saying because on one hand, the member is advocating and agreeing with the position that I have been trying to articulate on.
On the other hand, he comes back and is disagreeing.
What I am trying to say, for the record, very clearly is that I don’t want, as minister, and this government doesn’t want as a government, to get into community encumbering, not community empowering.
In the past, we have seen where things have been, as the member has pointed out, and I think the member is really 100 percent correct on, is downloading services and programs to communities and expecting them to pick that up.
As governments go through different transfers and phases, maybe the dollar values that we are able to do the encumbering and empowering at the beginning is not there later on. A lot of the communities don’t have the resources to be able to take on those responsibilities.
So what we are saying is we want to, as the member has just indicated, is to help build that capacity, where a DEA and community has the capacity to take on those responsibilities, that will be articulated in the Act.
Then on written submission to the minister, they would say, “We are in the process right now and we have the ability to be able to be more involved in the Human Resource capacity of our schools. We would like to take this responsibility on.” Then we would be able to do that in the Act.
It would be enabling legislation.
I don’t expect that every community in Nunavut, number one, would want to do that, and number two, has the ability as the member has suggested. So, I am in agreement with that, what the member is saying. So we are interested in community empowering, not community encumbering.
We need to build that capacity at the community level. That is part of what we are trying to do right now, through the Act.
That is why we need enabling legislation, and that brings us to the crux of the problem we are experiencing right now with some of the delays. How do we work out what is needed?
We want to make sure, when legislation comes forward, we do exactly what we are trying to say we want to do in the advocacy and the capacity role, and not what the member is trying to say may happen, because we agree with him.
But that is not what we want to happen where we encumber a community.
Mr. Curley: Thank you Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Minister’s Statement. I have never seen any empowerment that really works during the last few years because the agreement was never really been backed up by any major comprehensive policy and legislation.
In the end they disappear like any season when the spring comes through they melt with the snow and everything disappeared, couldn’t really be backed up because there was no legislation policy to back it up. That’s really what these empowerment initiatives are all about.
What I am saying is, and I was once told that if you’re not ready today, you are never going to be ready.
In Iqaluit, if they are not ready today to have either more autonomy given to them and administer educational policy and all that type of thing, moving towards education or school board, it probably will never happen unless we have a standardized or same policy to be applied through all Nunavut communities.
But I don’t think this will come about in a short time at all.
I think that’s going to take quite a long time if we waited until all the other communities are ready before we get some of the communities like Iqaluit, Cambridge Bay and larger centres that are ready which would off load some of the pressures as far as the case the headquarters are facing where they can take on more of the authority. So that’s what I mean. Why do you feel you would have to wait until all the other communities are ready before more autonomy can be given to those places that are ready and really have a capacity to take on the job?
Hon. Ed. Picco: Maybe I’m not being clear.
Again, it seems what I say; he is looking at a different angle. I’m saying left, he’s saying right and we are agreeing it’s in the center.
What I am saying, maybe I can try it again.
When we develop the legislation, the legislation is developed, and what we are trying to say is this: if the community would like to take on additional responsibilities, in the new legislation, it will be an enabling legislation, where I will have a process in the legislation and will be able to say: Rankin Inlet, as a community, you would like to do more on the Human Resources side of things, meaning they’d like to be involved in a fuller process of hiring teachers as an example.
They would write the department as a mechanism and say, “We would like to take on more roles and responsibilities.”
We would then see if they have the capacity to do that. Maybe Rankin Inlet and Iqaluit and Qikiqtarjuaq would like to do that and they have the ability. Maybe Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay don’t want to.
So, we wouldn’t be forcing anything. We would have to provide that check and balance because when they would like to take something on, we would ensure that they have the ability logistically, administratively and financially to be able to do that.
So that’s what we are suggesting in developing the legislation. We want to empower, not encumber. Because, again, I agree with the member when we talk about in the past, we’re working on empowering communities rather than encumbering communities, not giving them the opportunity to grow.
That is the way that legislation would be developed and put in place.
Mr. Curley: Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Yes, I appreciate the minister’s clarification.
I think it really is a timing issue. I think that’s what he is talking about.
I don’t want to try and pretend that we had the same interpretation of what Nunavummiut want. Surely you know from the community that communities are our priorities just, they’re not all the same, I agree.
Legislation will be the one that will be clear and that will be a standard and we look forward to seeing those standards been finally tabled.
I have other questions that I asked the minister the other day, I alluded to the fact that Inuit language is being asked for by many communities to be used primarily for language of instruction.
Where does the minister himself stand with respect to the issue of language of instruction which should be applied throughout Nunavut?
I thank the member for his comments.
I think we agree in the process we’re empowering communities. Again, stronger DEAs would make stronger communities. Before I answer that question, I just want to make an observation.
It is same thing when you look at tax based municipalities. There’s only one tax based municipality in all of Nunavut, and that’s Iqaluit.
More than 20 years ago it became a tax based municipality when its population was almost 60 percent of what it is today. Now we have Cambridge Bay that recently in the media has talked about how they could come forward as a tax based municipality.
That hasn’t been raised, for example, in Rankin which is the second largest community. Do they want to do that?
Should they be forced to do that? Should the legislation be empowering, to enable that community itself to decide if it should move to a tax based status?
That’s what we’re saying with the Education Act, if the DEA wants to take on more roles and responsibilities they would have that opportunity under the new Act because they would be able to write the minister and say, we would like to do this and here is what we have in place to be able to accomplish what we would like to do, and here’s where we would like the Department of Education to help us, whether that’s in the policy side or on the administrative side.
Quickly, on the language of instruction, Mr. Chairman, the language of instruction and the bilingual education model as all the members know, and I am sure Mr. Curley, among many members have read the Berger Report which has endorsed the bilingual education strategy which was introduced by this minister and this government in 2004.
Mr. Berger points out in his report that the direction of a dual language model and the language of instruction, the bilingual model itself is the correct model to move forward with.
We have three types of the bilingual education model, and each community decides, not the Minister of Education. The DEAs decide which will be the language of instruction under the Bilingual Education Strategy.
We have three models which is a two way dual model system, we have the immersion model, and we also have what’s called the Qulliq model and those three models depends on each community, for example, if a community has more English speakers, something like the Iqaluit situation, they would look at taking on probably the two way, or dual model system.
If you’re in, for example, Kugluktuk or Cambridge Bay with Inuinnaqtun, they would look at the immersion model of the language of instruction.
Most other communities in Nunavut would have the Qulliq model of instruction and we have already talked about that.
That process and the language of instruction have already been passed by Cabinet and the Bilingual Education Strategy has already been tabled here in the House and I am sure the members are aware of it.
Mr. Curley: Thank you. I thank the minister for the response.
I think there is quite a lot of interest in that from our constituency.
I think the impact really has yet to be seen, so you know when you deal with something of that kind, how is it going to impact on the students for post-secondary education ability?
When we have three choices it really sounds good, but do you really, as a minister, do you feel that from K to12 if students have gone through all these three models or three choices will have the best tools to go into post secondary education and then on or these people that are continuing to rely on local language instruction, are they primarily targeting themselves for local market in terms of jobs and so on rather than preparing themselves for the broader educational opportunities.
So has that been thoroughly researched that we have the best option?
So we’re not just opening it up, like one young student down south, Inuit student said “I believe we have too many choices right now.”
So, as a result of that, they are not working as hard as they should.
So what will the impact on all our graduates be, you know… if we’re not prepared to enter into the global criteria, or to those needed to challenge the world, these are the kinds of things that I think about when we’re … in some areas would we be weakening the Education Act? Or we’re going to have Nunavut made only, Nunavut employees only? That sort of thing.
I need your thoughts on that because I think there will be tremendous impact on our students with so many, not standardized but three different types, as you indicated earlier.
Out of the three models that we talked about, again it’s up to each of the communities through the local DEA, to decide what should be the language of instruction at the school, at the local school in a given community.
All three models outcome at the end of the day is to provide a bilingual student who would be proficient in their first, the child learns English, French, or Inuktitut and a secondary language whether that be English, French, or Inuktitut.
Mr. Berger in his report as the members know and his panel of experts believe that is the way to move, to move towards having language nests, move toward having the bilingual strategy in place.
Mr. Berger points out that it could take 15 to 20 years to do that.
We have to revolutionize and revitalize what is occurring right now in our school system.
Mr. Berger points out that since 2003 and before the education system and the system that we had in place was not turning out the outcomes that we needed. He does suggest though that since 2004 with the bilingual education model that we have introduced and those three types models that we talked about: the Qulliq, the Immersion and the dual or two way model, is the correct way to move.
So each outcome would be to have a bilingual student.
Again, Mr. Chairman, as the member has pointed out before, it’s very important that second language instruction begin in the home.
It’s important that we continue to have for example, Inuktitut spoken in the home, what happens in places like Iqaluit, when you have Inuktitut spoken in the home, you have what’s called a passive flexible language, and what that means is that, when I’m home for example, if my wife or I say to my kids Kujjangajuktuq, they are going to come back and say “it’s up side down Dad,” but they won’t say Kujjangajuq, however their comprehension is there.
And that’s what we see when we look at the loss of language as it is occurring.
Now Mr. Curley smiled at that because he knows there may be some Kutak there as the minister, but that’s okay, I can take that.