EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
The original amount budget for 2002-2003 decreased from 50 thousand dollars to 30.
This is not because we plan to acquire less art.
That simply reflects the fact that most pieces that we would likely acquire fall under the five thousand dollar level that is used to differentiate a capital acquisition from an acquisition funded through O&M expenditures.
Mr. Chair, I’d also like to take a moment to mention major elements in our five year capital plan.
This is the acquisition of equipment for Elections Nunavut, an agency that is funded through the appropriations of the Legislative Assembly.
In order to prudently prepare for the holding of general elections sometime at the beginning of the 2003 fiscal year, we have budgeted 100 thousand dollars in order to ensure appropriate capacity in this area.
Mr. Chair, I believe that this capital plan is a responsible and modest one that will enable us to better serve the needs of the members, and work towards the ongoing improvement of our Chamber and building, a building which residents of Nunavut can be proud of.
Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening comments and I’ll be glad to take any comments or questions that you may have.
Could you introduce your witnesses.
Speaker: Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair, on my right is Mr. John Quirke, the Clerk of the Assembly and on my left, your right Mr. Steve Pollock, Director of Finance for the Assembly and Corporate Services.
The committee chair for Ajauqtiit can start with his opening comments.
The Standing Committee Ajauqtiit has carefully reviewed the capital estimates for the Office of the Legislative Assembly.
As chair of the Standing Committee I am pleased to be able to provide the committee’s opening comments as we begin the review of the department’s 2002-2003 capital estimates.
Mr. Chairman, the committee is pleased that the recommendations that were made to the Office of the Legislative Assembly have been met, such as funds for a Legislative Assembly vehicle, landscaping initiatives such as the new Unity Place where all the flags of Nunavut are now displayed.
This was an exciting event for the public when members raised community flags.
Mr. Chairman, the committee is impressed with the variety of artwork that is being shown in the Great Hall of the Legislative Assembly.
Nunavut has a lot of talented artists and we are pleased to exhibit the people's artwork for all to see.
Members are pleased with newly acquired artwork such as the Sanikiluaq basket collection, the Pangnirtung tapestries, the doll collection from Nunavut and the paintings by artists from Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay.
The committee looks forward to the future acquisitions of more tapestries from Baker Lake and Arviat and prints from Cape Dorset.
The members are also pleased to see that the Office of the Legislative Assembly continues to improve the library and AV system.
All systems must be operational for effective broadcasting and smooth simultaneous translation.
The members are also pleased with the automated library cataloguing system being used in conjunction with the needs of the Legislative Library, the Court Library and possibly the Iqaluit Library to have joint access to both English and Inuktitut collections.
I anticipate that individual members will raise their own comments and concerns on the 2002/2003 Capital Estimates.
Members now have ten minutes to make general comments.
If there are none, we can turn to page 1 - 6 in the capital estimates.
Office of the Legislative Assembly.
Total Capital Expenditures, 180 thousand.
Chairperson (interpretation): Buildings and Works.
Page 1 - 7.
Total buildings and works, 130 thousand.
Total headquarters region, 50 thousand.
Total equipment acquisition, 50 thousand. Agreed.
Total capital expenditures, 180 thousand.
Back to page 1 - 5.
We have now completed the Legislative Assembly Capital Estimates.
Mr. Speaker, do you have any closing remarks.
I just want to thank the members for their support over the last year.
I am looking forward to another year.
We are now going to move on to Bill 12.
Could Sue Cooper Law Clerk come up to the front please.
Bill 12, Appropriation Act No. 1.
Bill 12, Appropriation Act No. 1, 2002/2003.
It should be in your binders.
Volume 2 binder.
Bill 12.
Did you find the Bill 12 summary.
Some Members: Agreed  Chairperson (interpretation): Opposed.
Carried. Clause 2.
Agreed.  Some Members: Agreed
Clause 3. Agreed.
I was missing a page.
There. Clause 4.
Vote two.
Amounts appropriated for the fiscal year.
Capital appropriations. 70 million 335 thousand. Agreed.
Carried. Total appropriation, 70 million 335 thousand.
Bill 12 is completed.
Chairperson (interpretation): Opposed. Carried. Bill 12 is ready for third reading.
Thank you, there were no questions, so what is the wish of the committee.  >>Applause
Earlier we had agreed that we were going to deal with Bill 18.
We can deal with Bill 18.
Bill 18. Minister Ng do you have any comments for the members.
Bill 18 - An Act to Amend the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council Act - Consideration in Committee
Mr. Ng: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am pleased to have the opportunity today to appear before the committee to introduce Bill 18, An Act to Amend the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council Act.
The purpose of this initiative is to tie any increases or decreases to the indemnities payable to Members of the Legislative Assembly to any increases and decreases to the rates of pay of members of the public service of Nunavut.
In effect, Mr. Chairman the MLA's wouldn't get an annual raise unless our public servants first got one through the collective bargaining process.
The increase would be exactly the same.
Mr. Chairman this initiative is fair and not unprecedented in Canada.
This recognises that elected legislatures will set an example by not awarding themselves larger annual pay raises than those provided to our hard-working public servants.
In the event that difficult circumstances were to oblige us to undertake cutbacks it would also ensure that we share in those reductions.
Mr. Chairman, this measure is a balanced and responsible one and I thank the members for their contributions to its development.
I look forward to any questions or comments the members may have.
Chairperson (interpretation): Perhaps the Minister of Finance can go to the witness table.
Are there any questions or comments from the members.
Bill 18, An Act to Amend the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council Act.
Carried. Clause three.
Chairperson (interpretation): Are you agreed that Bill 18 is concluded and is now ready for third reading.
Chairperson (interpretation): Bill 18 is complete and ready for third reading.
Can we now deal with Minister's Statement 96-1(5).
Mr McLean.
Mr. McLean (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to start on the minister of education's statement. Thank you.  Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you.
Mr. McLean.  Mr. McLean: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to start with the questioning, I have no statement to make other than questioning.
Can you take the witness table.
Did you want to bring your witnesses in, Mr. Kilabuk.
My Deputy will assist me at this time and there was going to be another employee of mine with us but she is not able to be here at this time.
So my Deputy will be assisting me.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you Mr. Minister, perhaps you can introduce your Deputy Minister.
The two officials that will be with me today, on my right is Tom Rich, My Deputy Minister and on my left is the Assistant Deputy Minister Naullaq Arnaquq.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you for appearing in front of us.
I don't think we have any opening remarks at this time, and we will just get into questions.
Mr. Chairman, all my questioning today will be on education people working in the Department of Education for Nunavut.
Mr. Chairman, in regards to the Minister's Statement, many more to come and I really support the minister on his statement that he made about Pond Inlet and the Pond Inlet school as an example of when people who work hard to achieve their goals in life for becoming educational professionals, especially Inuit, it shows that it can be done.
We're empathic in Nunavut and we talk about the future of Nunavut and how many young people we have in our schools, and they have aspirations and dreams of becoming professionals, whether it's teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers and other professionals.
I just want to question the minister on where his department is going in regards to his Inuit employees and the levels that he has in his department.
I wanted to know, I'm not criticizing the department or the minister and I support him in his endeavours to increase Inuit employees in his department.
Like everybody else in this Assembly, but I just want to direct a few questions to the minister about it.
I have some information here that I would like to confirm with the minister about his department and it's from the Department of Human Resources latest tabled document on the status of employment in the Government on Nunavut as of March 31st, 2001.
It shows that 427 out of 918 employees or 48% of the Department of Education are Inuit Beneficiaries.
Only 6 out of 26 communities in Nunavut have over 60% Inuit employees in education, only 13 out of 26 communities have over 50% Inuit employees in education.
This is from the Department of Education that I received it today.
November 2001, current number of professionals including teachers, principals and financial managers and so on.
This doesn't include your clerical staff, janitorial staff.
Out of a total of 435, 125 are Inuit, which is less than 25%.
Was the minister aware of that.
I have worked closely with my colleagues and my employees, my officials, as we work on our responsibilities and we were aware of the numbers that he was relating to.
Well, when I got the results today, I was a little disappointed that less than a one-quarter of the professionals in the Department of Education are Inuit.
I'm sure his senior staff have meetings and update him on what they are doing to increase the numbers, like I said less than 25% of professionals in the education department is a bit low.
Does he have any plans to try to increase it and what are his long term plans to increase it.
We do want to see an increase in Inuit employment within our department and in the management field.
Using June 30 as an example, within the Department of Education there were 112 Inuit teachers, two Inuit principals and four in training as principals and six were assistant principals.
There were also a total of 82 Inuktitut language instructors.
We have tried to concentrate on teacher education programs and today there are more people from the communities that are able to take advantage of these teacher education programs in Pond Inlet and the one other community that is represented.
There are more people coming out of these communities taking these programs. As well these teacher education programs were also able to be taught so that they may get their Bachelor of Arts degree.
As well with this budget the teacher education program, if they want to further their education, other than become teachers there are some programs available for them.
So they may take further education.
We are trying to further educate our staff so they may be able to take on management responsibilities, such as becoming principals and other management roles.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to answer the question by saying yes we are trying to increase Inuit employment opportunities.
We want them to be more involved in our department.
Mr. Chairman like I said earlier in my tourism report, we're estimating 170 graduates in Nunavut this year.
I have just seen an ad in the newspaper from the Government of the Northwest Territories that there is a request for proposals out to try to attract young people into the teaching profession.
What is this department doing to attract graduates into taking a rewarding and challenging career in education.
To date I haven't seen any department in this government try to attract young graduates from our high schools, other than sustainable development in a career in environmental technology.
I've got to say that at least Sustainable Development is trying to attract young people in there.
What is this department doing to attract young graduates to think about a career in education.
Chairperson (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. McLean Mr. Kilabuk.
He is correct in saying that I do not have a lot to show him here but we do assist in the field of further education.
We are in support of further education in each community.
It is obvious we all want to see more Inuit educators.
We have also seen an increase in our local employees, and we do see an increase in training opportunities being taken by local residents.
Another issue I would like to share with you is in respect to further education as well.
In the House I will be providing a report on what we are doing in education to advance further local employment.
Mr. McLean: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, like I say I am not picking on the Department of Education today, I am supporting the department and the minister.
In the senior management level we have twenty percent Inuit employees and in the middle management we have seventeen percent.
What are the minister and the department doing to attract Inuit into the middle and senior management roles if anything.
Hon. Peter Kilabuk (interpretation): Mr. Chairman, I will get my deputy to respond to the member's question.
Chairperson (interpretation): Mr. Rich
Mr. Rich: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We've been working with staff in the department of education to develop a long range Inuit employment plan that is based on the statistics that you have been quoting and looking at and to put in place plans to encourage people to take positions in the Department of Education.
We're happy with the fact that at the executive level actually, there 67 percent of the staff in the department are beneficiaries but as you pointed out there certainly a long way to go, at other levels of the department.
The challenge as you indicated is to find more individuals that have the professional training. So part of that strategy is to promote the NTEP program for students and we fund currently about 1.9 million dollars a year, the NTEP program on community basis in addition to the program that's based here in Iqaluit, that provides more people to come up within to the Department of Education.
We work in local communities with the staff in local communities to ensure that when there are job applications that Inuit are encouraged to apply for the positions.
We're also working on developing mentoring program.
We're looking at opportunities to provide more training programs through Nunavut Arctic College that will provide the preparation for people to come into the Department of Education. We're also working with staff with department to set a specific target in all sectors within the department for the next five years, to increase the number of Inuit in various positions that you mentioned.
That's good to hear that and I'm glad that consulting communities, I come from a community where we have a regional office and, in that community there is the Department of Education that's supposed to move from librarian positions into Baker Lake.
We're two and half years into the mandate and they still haven't filled the a couple of positions in the library and I went to the previous Deputy Minister and the previous Minister and said that it's going to take a few years to get this library into Baker Lake, the Baker Lake Nunavut Library Headquarters.
I said would you consider a training program because you do have quite a few people in the community that have their bachelor education etc, etc in which you can consider some kind of a little training program. Or identifying some people in the community that would be interested in taking this, because it takes a year or two to get them trained and we sort of yeah, we'll look into it and two years later, nothing has been done.
So it's nice to hear that you are working on that type of initiative because it's been lacking in the past. Like I say I'm not picking on the Department of Education today but sometimes it's hard to have vision when you have a high turnover of staff in the Department of Education with your southern people and you know it gets lost in the shuffle in different priorities etc, etc.
So I'm glad to hear you doing that because like I say earlier in order to attract graduates into teaching professions and a lot of young graduates say to me Glenn, I ask them why don’t' you get involved being a teacher or nurse and they says the work is very, very difficult.
So the presumption of the young person out there that's graduating from high school is I don't want to go into a class with thirty kids because it's too much work and I don’t' think that's a good analogy of it.
I think the perception is wrong, I think it's very rewarding to go in and teach and nurture and bring kids forward and such a rewarding experience for an individual to do that.
That's why I'm saying what are we doing to attract teachers into the teaching profession.
I'm looking at the turnover now, in some schools the numbers are going down so on that Mr. Chairman, I don’t want to hog this whole thing, I'm sure there's other members that want to ask this questions, so I'm going to ask some more question.
My next question is in the Baffin region we have 27 principals in total 8 of them are Inuit, including co-principals, are these all in the elementary school.
Yes, there are all in the elementary schools.
What are we doing or what's the department’s plan to try to get Inuit principals in 7 to 12 schools.
Is there any kind of plan from the government to try to get Inuit into the high schools because in a lot of high schools and I know in my community a lot of high school students’ parents are unilingual. And it’s difficult for them to go in and talk to the principal when they can’t converse in their own language and yes there is the thing that we do have Inuit secretaries.
But I think the Inuit people would be more comfortable talking with a principal that speaks their own language.
What programs do you have if any at all to rectify this.
The school principals we would like them to have a knowledge of what they are doing in high schools and not be nervous about their job and whether they can do it or not.
The middle management positions have to have experience in working through middle management before they can become principals of the schools.
We have to be able to know whether they want to become high school principals and we want them to be comfortable before they take on the job of being a high school principal.
Mr. McLean: Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I’ll rephrase my question.
What is the department doing to identify teachers in the elementary end to go in and try to be principals in the high school end.
I cannot answer the member’s question.
Perhaps I could get my deputy who has worked on this to respond to the question.
Chairperson (interpretation): Mr. Rich.
Mr. Rich: Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The difficulty with moving elementary teachers into secondary teachers in an administrative position is the different type of training that secondary teachers typically have.
The normal route for training a secondary teacher is to start with a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science degree in a specialty subject area and then a Bachelor of Education degree.
The NTEP program currently is training teachers for the elementary school level and not for the secondary school level because of that requirement for the undergraduate degree first.
So we’re looking at a couple of options to deal with that.
One is to encourage teachers who have gone through the normal NTEP program to go back and work on a subject specialty. It doesn’t necessarily require a full Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science degree. It can be done by getting enough credit hours in a subject area to be qualified to teach at the secondary level and the subject.
The second avenue that we’re looking at is opportunities for Masters degrees for teachers who have gone through the Bachelor of Education program after completing the NTEP program.
The Pond Inlet graduates would be good example of that where the students went through the NTEP program then went through a Bachelor of Education program.
In some areas they may have enough strength already to be in fact a subject level at the high school level by going the Master of Education route.
We’ve been looking at opportunities to start offering Masters of Education through distance education.
We’d like to see some opportunities like that happen so that people can stay in their home community and work on it.
One of the particular obstacles obviously is the typical secondary training route requires people to go south.
So again through the FANS, the student assistance program we’re encouraging those who want to, to take opportunities to go south and get a degree program.
And so we are looking at the opportunities.
There certainly are challenges.
Funding is a challenge.
We’d like to see the opportunities through Arctic College to offer more programs like that in communities.
That will require the finding of additional resources over the years to sponsor more university level courses that are offered in the territory.
On that are you going to implement that or try to do that shortly or is this something that’s on the back burner and you may get to it someday, because they’ve been offering just the TEP program in Nunavut and they’ve just been offering the elementary school program in Nunavut for the last umpteen years and it’s very hard.  We talk about teachers going south, Inuit teachers going south.
Most of them have extended families and it’s difficult enough for a single person and the frustration that I went through for my constituents living on FANS support to go south and try to get a master’s degree or a specialty degree and stuff like that.
So is your department working on a plan to probably bring this forward in Nunavut in the future.
Mr. Rich: Yes, I'm delighted to say that’s a priority and it's part of our Inuit employment plan for the next year we are working on.
We've identified the need for more secondary teachers as a particularly high priority for it.
We are delighted with the large number of Inuit elementary school teachers that have gone through the NTEP program and we have targeted secondary teachers to be the next area to work aggressively.
Chairperson (interpretation): We'll have Mr. Iqaqrialu at this point.
I fully support the Department of Education and Mr. Kilabuk’s Minister’s Statement.
Also we are extremely proud of what they are doing but we do need to give more support to the schools and the staff of the community level.
Using Pond Inlet as an example it was something that we are extremely proud of because they are all Inuit teachers.
Even though that's the case I do have a problem with some of the policies that the Department of Education has.
We have to use the many rules relating the schools, and that creates a problem at the community level.
It also prevents some of the staff from climbing up the ladder to go into management levels and also to acquire degrees and so on.
I would also like to say that we have an extreme shortage of housing in Nunavut and that's the case in every single community, getting people from the south to work in the communities creates a problem because they don't have the staff housing to house these southern imports.
Also in the communities there are some people who are trying to get jobs but they don’t' get hired.
And if they hire people from the south sometimes they don’t even take the jobs because they don’t have the staff housing that they can get into.
In the community in Broughton Island, we are starting to see more and more shortage of housing and there was an increase in population every year.
It seems like we are seeing more and more southern teachers coming into communities even though we now have Nunavut.
So we have to look into this seriously, those are the main comments that I wanted to make. I believe that we have to at least find some solutions for this and look at how we can make improvements.