Mr. Chairperson (Gerry McAlpine): Order, please. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. This afternoon this section of the Committee of Supply meeting in Room 254 will resume consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Education and Training. When the committee last sat, it had been considering item 16.1. Administration and Finance (b) Executive Support (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits on page 46 of the Estimates book. Shall the item pass?

Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): Mr. Chairman, I think the minister had a number of things to table. I wondered if we could begin with that, a number of things that he was going to table from yesterday.

Hon. James McCrae (Minister of Education and Training): Mr. Chairman, yesterday we talked about students in care of child welfare agencies. I am going to table the Guideline for Registration of Students in Care of Child Welfare Agencies.

This protocol was developed in response to requests from the field so that services and educational programming could be better developed for children in care. There continues to be ongoing dialogue with Education and Family Services and agencies in school divisions to implement the protocol and have everyone become knowledgeable and skilled in using the protocol to support children. So I am going to table that today.

The honourable member asked about the FAST Program, Families and Schools Together. This program is a four-year pilot project that has now completed its second year. The evaluation process is underway with criteria which include a look at outcome measures for families involved in the program. We look forward to the completed pilot with four years of evaluation data to determine the effectiveness of this model.

The FAST Program is a school-based program targeted to children between the ages of four and nine, the K to Grade 3 levels, who have been identified as at risk of future social, academic and substance abuse problems. Once those children have been identified, the school approaches the child's parents for agreement to become involved with the FAST Program. The program is available to the entire family after regular school hours. The duration of the program is approximately eight weeks but also includes monthly follow-up sessions called Fastworks for a two-year period.

While participating in the program, families work together on projects aimed at developing a positive image of the school system and at stressing the overall importance of education. The province and the Winnipeg Foundation are funding partners.

FAST employs an evaluation methodology that includes four quantitative measures and one qualitative measure. One is the revised behaviour problem checklist and assessment instrument used to screen behaviour disorders in schools. The checklist contains six subscales that measure conduct disorder, socialized aggression, attention problems, anxiety withdrawal, psychotic behaviours and motor excess. Parents and teachers complete this checklist for the children identified as at risk.

There is the family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scales. This scale rates a family's level of adaptability, or ability to change, and cohesion, which is the degree to which the family is connected. Thirdly, social insularity subscale of the parenting stress inventory. This scale measures parents' perceptions of social support, thus linking. There is the WITTE parent survey. Selected questions from this survey are completed by parents to determine the level of contact between the school and parents and the involvement of the parents in school activities.

Then there is Families and Schools Together, a program evaluation by family. This is an open-ended questionnaire that provides families with an opportunity to explain the impact of the program on their lives. As of September 30, 1998, the FAST Program had been introduced at four schools, those being Machray, Margaret Park, Glenwood and Lavallee, resulting in the completion of six eight-week cycles. During the reporting period, FAST Program graduates included 55 families, 85 parents and 147 children. In the fall of 1998, Wellington School became the fifth school to implement the FAST Program. That is what I have to say about that.

Mr. Chairman, the honourable member also asked about programming for gifted and talented students. Parents who have a student who is gifted or talented need to work in partnership with the school team to identify the ways in which the best possible program can be developed to meet the student's unique learning needs. Schools and school divisions have the responsibility of meeting the needs of all students. The programming for gifted and talented students remains under local jurisdiction. Programming initiatives for students who are gifted and talented fall under the responsibility of the local jurisdictions. Manitoba Education and Training provides a formula grant for Level I programming. This includes support for students who are gifted or talented. School divisions utilize the funding allocation of Level I in various ways based on the identified needs in their divisions. The majority of school divisions provide support to students who are gifted or talented in the context of the regular classroom, providing a learning environment that is enriched and challenging through diverse instructional strategies.

New Directions initiatives support the need for a rigorous and challenging educational program through numerous support documents. These include: success for all learners, differentiating instruction, differentiating instruction of bibliography, a thinking framework, teaching thinking across the curriculum and Senior 3 Visions and Ventures: An Entrepreneurship Practicum. All curriculum frameworks documents contain prescribed outcomes and suggestions for teaching, learning and assessment that encompass the needs of all learners, including those for whom enrichment and extension of the curriculum is appropriate. In addition, the outcomes of each curriculum are presented so teachers can adapt their teaching to meet the needs of students who are gifted or talented.

This format has been widely applauded by schools that use a multiple intelligence approach to teaching. Elements such as greater attention to problem-solving and the use of technology are integrated into all curricula as they are developed. This provides another means in which the student who is gifted or talented can be challenged. Standards testing has a range of questions that include some that will challenge the student who is gifted or talented. In addition, the standards testing will enable schools to identify as early as Grade 3 students who are meeting and exceeding expected outcomes in English language arts and mathematics.

Some divisions have developed policies and support for students who are gifted or talented. Here are some examples.

In Winnipeg School Division No. 1, the division includes in their ADAP a section on gifted and talented programming. The goal outlined in this section is to provide appropriate instruction in educational services particular to the needs of gifted and talented. The division also outlines program goals such as student identification, professional development and curriculum support.

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In St. James-Assiniboia School Division No. 2, in Grades 4 to 12, there are assigned co-ordinators to support teachers. In addition to many division-wide extracurricular programs, the division has the GATE program for gifted and talented education. The GATE program includes partial pull-out of the regular classroom.

In Assiniboine South School Division No. 3, they first addressed the needs of the division with a document developed locally entitled Services for Gifted Children, 1984. The document provides a philosophy and material resources. This support is the basis for the division's challenge program for gifted and talented students. A specific policy was not adopted. The division feels that students who have outstanding capabilities and those who are capable of exceptional performance should receive accommodations and services to meet their needs and realize their potential.

In Fort Garry School Division No. 5, there is an elementary program co-ordinator for enrichment who provides program support for school-based initiatives.

In Tiger Hills School Division No. 29, this division outlines an action plan for enrichment, gifted education in their ADAP. The division piloted an action plan from 1992 to 1997. The division provided training to staff to increase the division's capacity to provide enrichment to gifted students. The model gradually built on the division's resources until all schools in the division had incorporated some form of enrichment programming.

In Turtle Mountain School Division No. 44, they included in their annual divisional action plan a section on the gifted and/or talented program. This outlines a philosophy and the programming principles. The outline was developed by a divisional committee which supports a pull-out program for students who are gifted. This is one of the divisions I had the privilege to visit.

I also visited Winnipeg School Division, and I have been in St. James-Assiniboia School Division. I have been to Fort Garry School Division. Assiniboine South, I am going there tonight. Tiger Hills, I do not think I have visited yet, but Turtle Mountain I have, and they have some great schools in places like Killarney and Boissevain. They have a superintendent there who would maybe be known to the honourable member, in the person of Jerry Storie, the former Education minister in the province of Manitoba. He is the superintendent down there in Turtle Mountain School Division, a very progressive area of the province. I met with teachers there and I met with students. I had a very educational and enjoyable time there.

In Frontier School Division No. 48, up until June 1998, the division had a 0.5 staff year of a consultant, a 42-hour training program for teachers in divisional policy approved by the board. After the fall of 1998, the division reallocated responsibility for the education of gifted and talented students to the area special needs staff. The division provides the ongoing resource of a consultant to assist teachers in incorporating best practices into daily instruction, so the department continues to support the approach used in all new curriculum where the enrichment of students and the diversity of learner needs are met within the context of the classroom and the school.

The honourable member also asked about transitions from school to adult day services, the Supported Living Program. The number of students who have individual transitional plans will vary from year to year based on the number of students leaving the school system. The honourable member asked, I think, how many there were and the answer is that it varies. The Supported Living Program typically projects between 75 and 90 individuals each year who will meet eligibility criteria and require day services upon graduation from school at age 21. The transition planning process has identified 93 individuals who will require day services in 1999-2000.

The department expects to be able to serve all of these graduates with new resources required to serve 58 of these individuals. The balance of 35 individuals is expected to be served through vacancies created by movement to paid employment or movement to alternate services due to deteriorating health and aging.

The day services component of the Department of Family Services Supported Living Program provides for a range of supports and training to assist adults with a mental disability to participate in the community through day program activities that can be broadly characterized as follows: first, supported employment and follow-up services support individuals in jobs at competitive wages in community settings; second, services with a vocational focus develop, maintain and maximize an individual's vocational and social skills that may lead to competitive employment. Services may be delivered in a day service facility or in a community setting. Third, individualized developmental services develop, maintain and maximize an individual's personal care skills, emotional growth, physical development, socialization opportunities and communication skills.

Services may be delivered in a day service facility or in a community setting. The age of eligibility for day services is consistent with the age at which an individual loses his or her right to attend school under Section 259 of The Public Schools Act. Individuals become eligible in July of the calendar year in which they reach 21 years of age.

The Family Services department expects to fund day services for about 2,220 adults with a mental disability in the year 1999-2000 at a total cost of approximately $16.2 million. The 1999-2000 budget included a $2-million increase for day services to expand programming, as well as to increase funding levels to service providers by 5 percent. The Valley Rehab Centre Inc. at Winkler and Versatech Industries Inc. of Winnipeg are examples of large, more traditional day services focusing primarily on facility-based vocational services with approximately 110 and 270 participants respectively. Both agencies simulate a light manufacturing and packaging environment. The Valley Rehab Centre focuses on woodworking, packaging and assembly and the corresponding sale of goods produced. Versatech also is engaged in packaging and assembly as well as recycling of paper. Project SAM Inc. of Portage la Prairie provides more community-based vocational services and is successful at securing and supporting paid employment for individuals eligible for day services supports. That is approximately 30 participants. Activities include lawn and property maintenance, residential snow removal and flyer delivery.

I hope that is responsive to the matters raised previously by the honourable member.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I just want to clarify something with the minister about the material he tabled which is labelled the Guidelines for Registration of Students in Care of Child Welfare Agencies. I was working from a Children and Youth Secretariat document which I think referred to foster children. Is this the same document? The word "foster children" does not appear in this one, either in the title or in the general description. Foster children are not necessarily–I know I am in the middle of a sentence. I will just wait for the minister to clarify that, and then I have some further questions on this line, thanks.

Mr. McCrae: It is the same document.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I want to ask one follow-up question on talented and gifted. The department has a general working definition of children who require modified programs in school. Does the department have a working definition of talented and gifted? For example, the department, I believe, says 5 percent approximately across the province or possibly even within a division is what they would consider within the range of modified programs, 5 percent of students.

Does the department have a working definition, a working percentage of talented and gifted?

Mr. McCrae: No, but we work from the knowledge that there is in the literature that suggests that about 2 percent of the population are gifted, but we do not have a clear-cut number to offer the honourable member as to how many.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, is there a working definition for how money is allocated then within the Level I funding for talented and gifted students? Are divisions working on the same principles? Are there comparable allocations across divisions?

Mr. McCrae: Maybe I will ask the honourable member just to put her question again very simply for us.

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Ms. Friesen: The minister indicated that talented and gifted funding at the moment is allocated in Level I of special needs funding. The special needs review is suggesting that the minister make a different kind of allocation. I am interested in what the past practice has been so that when an amount of money is allocated in Level I funding to a particular division, how does that division and under what definitions does that division operate to allocate money to gifted students? Are all divisions operating on the same principles and are those principles available from the Department of Education?

Mr. McCrae: The present situation or the previous situation has been that gifted students are included in the Level I categorization. When it comes to reporting from the school divisions, gifted children are included as one category along with the other categories. That is the present situation, and the special needs review is suggesting something differently, and that would be something that the department and the partners we are working with will have to address.

Divisions have the flexibility to allocate Level I funds based on the programs they design. They then report the expenditures based on the definitions in the FRAME report. The definition in the FRAME manual indicates that programming that is provided that is beyond what the regular programs can offer for individual students. I hope that answers the honourable member's question.

Ms. Friesen: Are divisions required to have programming for gifted and talented children?

Mr. McCrae: Divisions are required to provide an education to all the children who are covered under The Public Schools Act, so that includes children who are gifted and children who have other special education requirements.

Ms. Friesen: How many divisions do offer programs in gifted and talented students?

Mr. McCrae: As I pointed out previously, Winnipeg School Division No. 1 provides services for gifted students and School Division No. 2 St. James-Assiniboia, School Division No. 4 St. Boniface, School Division No. 6 St. Vital–this is as identified in the FRAME report–also School Division No. 13 Agassiz, School Division No. 15 Hanover, School Division No. 18 Rhineland, School Division No. 24 Portage la Prairie, No. 26 Garden Valley, No. 33 Dauphin-Ochre, No. 35 Swan Valley, No. 38 Birdtail River, No. 42 Souris Valley, No. 44 Turtle Mountain, No. 48 Frontier and No. 49 DSFM.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, that seems to be less than half the school divisions of Manitoba offer that kind of programming. In looking at the special needs review recommendations, how will he be taking that into account, in particular, in determining equity and funding across school divisions?

Mr. McCrae: In each division there are a certain number of dollars made available to each division under the funding for education from the province. They also raise money for their operations through the special levy on the property tax, which is the subject of discussion in the House and will no doubt be part of the lower tax review announced in the throne speech and mentioned again in the budget brought down by the Minister of Finance (Mr. Gilleshammer).

Each division would implement programs differently, as I indicated earlier. Assiniboine South, for example, has a different approach than the one in St. James. This provides divisions with the responsibility and the flexibility to program for their uniquenesses. I named some districts for which funding is made available on the basis of identified and categorized children. That does not mean, as the honourable member has implied, that all the other divisions do not provide various types of enriched opportunities for gifted children in those divisions. The list that I gave to the honourable member simply outlines amounts made available, because the divisions in the cases I mentioned have categorized certain of the gifted children in the Level I category.

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Again, I say to the honourable member that does not mean that other divisions simply have no programming for their gifted children, because that would be quite an incorrect statement. Some call it enrichment, and because they do not call it gifted, then they do not report it. So therefore they do not receive funding because I assume they–well, they just have not. So that those who have identified children in a categorized way have received funding because presumably it requires additional funding to make that programming work, so that each division would have something that reflects their particular requirements.

The special education report did not specifically recommend that there be legislated or mandated gifted programming. But it did recommend that we specify funding for gifted children, and we are indeed looking at that recommendation.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, the final section of proposals from the special needs review looks at and recommends, in fact, a number of actions that I think have been recommended to the government before. In fact, after the last election, in the Postl report, there were recommendations for single-window access for students, for full-service schools where the school is the physical site for service delivery, for the versions of the child profile information system linked to cross-sector funding, and the intersectoral co-operation to provide consistent and accurate information to parents about the school system. I think versions of that and the fundamentals, the assumptions behind that, were all included in the Postl report in recommendations made to the government.

I know the minister is a former Minister of Health and will be familiar with that, and perhaps he will be able to tell us what progress the government has made in the past four years, or three years, on those recommendations for services to children through schools and through the bringing together of community and school resources to serve the child.

Mr. McCrae: Well, I have no doubt that in response to the Postl report, which I, by the way, brought forward as Minister of Health, although Dr. Postl did all the work, you would need literally a catalogue to respond accurately to the honourable member's question. I propose that we put together that catalogue, whether it takes one sheet or 20 sheets to do that. I think there has been significant progress made for the children of Manitoba since the very good work done by Dr. Brian Postl, so I will undertake to bring that forward.

Even then I would have to offer a caution that my fear is that we might not have a complete list of all the services that are being provided to children, some of which existed prior to the Postl report, some of which have been changed since the Postl report, and some have been brought into being since the Postl report. We do, indeed, support intersectoral co-operation. It was the present administration, after all, that brought together the Child and Youth Secretariat. It was this present administration that brought us the Proactive report on special education for Manitoba children. We commissioned that report. We co-operated in the work. We have recognized the tremendous opportunity Manitoba children have in Manitoba with the economy going the way it is and with the government laying out a climate for economic growth. We can see that there would be many, many opportunities. The tragedy would be if we did not respond to those students who risk not getting a fair piece of the economic action in the future because they did not get a good enough opportunity in school and in their early lives, because that is when it is clear that intervention and assistance can make such a difference.

There are many examples. We have put on to the record, references to many of the initiatives that we have undertaken. We know that in the special education report, once those recommendations are implemented, the catalogue of programming for young people in Manitoba will be significantly increased, so we have much work done and much work to do. I do not think that we would ever be finished because, as long as new issues come on the scene, new responses are going to be needed.

Special education teachers and special education planners and divisions tell me that in the '90s there has been a virtual flood of new circumstances coming into the school system, children with problems that we really have not been able to identify in the past, and now we are able to. Even those we could not identify in the past, I do not think we responded in a way that maximized the opportunities for these young Manitobans. We want to see school-linked services. We have those kinds of services now. We need to share databases and pay attention to issues related to confidentiality, but, I mean, I refer to programs like Baby Think It Over. We have got our child care in schools policy, which is much improved over any previous child care in schools policy in the past. We talked a while ago about the FAST Program, we have talked about the Family Navigation Project, initiatives related to fetal alcohol syndrome. The protocols we have talked about already. We have got pilot projects going on in schools.

We need to look at various models. Each model that we look at, if it is deemed to be a good approach, it is certainly something we can implement, but it may not be implemented in exactly the same way in every circumstance because we simply do not believe that you can have a one-size-fits-all type of programming for our children, so within the available resources, we need to be resourceful.

If you want to know about resourceful people, you need only talk for five minutes with special education teachers and assistants to know that these are extremely resourceful people. They have some excellent advice to offer. We can hope that the advice they give us has broad application, but I think we have learned enough to know that no one idea will work the same way with all the children so we have to be flexible.

I know the Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs (Mr. Reimer) would agree with that statement because in his own constituency there are children with myriad issues that we need to address. There are in my constituency, too, and in the constituency of the honourable member for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen). So I think what we need to do at this point is to recognize that special education is probably, for the duration, going to be something that will require attention year in and year out.

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Even if we arrived at the point where we could say that we have responded in full measure to every last recommendation in the Special Education Review, I would bet that in the very next school year, we would have challenges that the implementation of that report did not fully address. So we need to build into our system a recognition on the part of everybody that this kind of flexibility, resourcefulness and creativity is going to be the status quo from here on in. There is never going to be a day when the job is completed, as much as I would like to think that it will come and we will be able to announce that someday; that we have completed the implementation of every part of this report and then immediately thereafter new challenges will be upon us.

Manitoba Education supports better collaboration within government at the local level. Various communities have developed regional and intersectoral committees. Under the direction of the Children and Youth Secretariat, professionals from other departments have been invited to training events that have shared relevance such as the multisystem training program called Sharing the Caring. Many protocols have been developed with intersectoral collaboration such as the EBD and the URIS protocols. I hope that gives the honourable member a flavour of the direction this government wants to take us.

You know for, oh, what, seven, eight years now, at least five years, it seems to me maybe even more than that, my deputy and I cannot agree on that one, but I wonder who is going to win that argument. Well, whether it is five years or seven years or whatever, for a number of years, we have been working in a more corporate way so that each of the human services departments of government are required to work together in the development of the annual budget.

This approach, while it was difficult at first to get everybody used to talking about what one department was hoping to get out of a budget in the presence of a bunch of other departments, while that initially was quite an exercise, quite a new way of thinking, quite a different way of thinking, and there may even have been a little resistance, even on the part of some ministers, especially if you are from a department that might have to give up a little bit in favour of some other department. In the end, I believe incrementally each year, we ended up with a slightly better result than the year before, which tells me that was the right thing to do.

Flowing from that approach, it was felt that the Children and Youth Secretariat would have to be the vehicle that we could use to help bring departments together and to help bring out the best and the brightest in those departments to apply their minds to issues related to families and related to children in our province.

The establishment of the Children and Youth Secretariat, to me, having been one of the ministers involved in that, was a clear recognition on the part of the government, a clear indication too that no longer would we go about in our totally delirious assumption that everything was okay in our department and so everything was, therefore, okay. It was simply a way we once did business in this country and in this province, and it was time for that kind of change in thinking, a paradigm shift, if you like. It was important.

Even today, I bet you there are people in the various departments who will have recollections of difficult decisions being made, but at the end of it all, I think there is an acknowledgement that our children deserve us to put our heads together rather than work separately. So I think that the quality of what goes on in our schools, the quality of programming delivered by the Department of Family Services or Health or Justice or the Seniors Directorate or any of those, the quality has been enhanced by the fact that we are working together. Those best and brightest that I mentioned are working together rather than separately. I think we have some programs that I have referred to.

If I have not covered everything, and I do not think I have, we should maybe make a note and talk about it a little more next time we get together so that I can give the honourable member perhaps a more responsive, a more detailed response, it might take a little longer, but I hope not, but a detailed response to the questions that she raises. I think I will stop there. I will undertake to bring forward perhaps a more, it may be more complete, maybe not, but at least we will check over all of the different program initiatives that have come forward and maybe bring them to the attention of the honourable member the next day.

Ms. Friesen: My question asked for a progress report from the government on the Postl report, which was introduced four years ago, and which the special needs review seemed to think needed reiterating. I understood the minister to say that he would be tabling something next time which would give the progress report that I suggested, particularly dealing with the cross-sectoral authorities and the single-site service and the single window for accessing services for children.

There are two recommendations I believe that apply to the Children and Youth Secretariat. One is that the URIS manual be completed and distributed. I wonder if the minister could give me a progress report on that and how much of that is in fact his own department's responsibility and where the responsibility for that lies. The other is the department's participation in the special needs review recommendation that the mandate of the Children and Youth Secretariat be clearly articulated and more widely publicized. It certainly seems to be reflected in the body of the report, a requirement that that happen. I am interested to know who is going to take the lead on that and what mechanisms they will use for doing it as well as some information and responsibility for the completion of the URIS report.

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Mr. McCrae: The Special Education Review recommends that the URIS manual be completed and distributed. The lead for the development of the URIS manual was the Children and Youth Secretariat, and there is a committee for this. It is chaired by the Department of Family Services. The Department of Education and Training has a representative on that committee. I recognize that anything related to the Children and Youth Secretariat should indeed be publicized. I just hope that if we did that and spent any money doing it that we would not be subject to the same kind of criticism that has been forthcoming from the official opposition with respect to the $500,000 expenditure in health to keep Manitobans up to date on the improvements that have been happening in the health care system.

It seems like if you do something like that, as the song used to go, you are danged if you do and darned if you don't, sort of thing.

An Honourable Member: Sing it for us.

Mr. McCrae: I cannot remember the tune or else I would perhaps. No, you do not need that today, the point being that I would like all Manitobans to know of the existence of the Children and Youth Secretariat. The honourable member is recommending that there be publicity about it, so we will have to take that one under advisement, because I do not know how much money is in the budget for publicity on this particular topic, if any. If not, where would we take the money from to do that? Those questions I am not able to answer today.

However, the mandate of the directorate is an important thing to be understood. Actually, this URIS policy committee is going to involve more than Family Services and Education because the Health department is involved as well, and working groups will be developed to establish specific policy issues.

There are draft terms of reference for the two committees of URIS which have been developed by representatives of the three-partner departments. They will be forwarded for review and approval to the lead department. They are drafts just in case the honourable member is thinking of asking about that or asking for them. I do not know if I want to do that at this point; being draft, it may be a little early. But certainly as it becomes appropriate for us to share information with the honourable member, we are quite anxious to share as much information with her and her colleagues as is appropriate in all the circumstances. I expect that the final document will be something that will be in the honourable member's hands when that becomes available.

Ms. Friesen: I think we need to be precise in noting the questions that are asked. I asked the minister how he was going to fulfill the recommendations of the special needs review on the Children and Youth Secretariat. I would not presume to make any recommendations to the minister on how he did that. I was merely asking for a report on how he was going to do that.

Perhaps the minister could tell us in what way the current advertising in health does address this particular recommendation. Is there anything about the Children and Youth Secretariat in the recent health advertising that the government has undertaken?

Mr. McCrae: Mr. Chairman, I certainly appreciate the advice of the honourable member about precision, and I know I certainly try very hard to do that. I guess we should follow our own advice from time to time too in terms of what is being asked for. With respect to the Special Education Review, I come back to recommendation (e)(1)(i) which says that the role and mandate of the Manitoba Children and Youth Secretariat be clearly articulated and more widely publicized.

I do not know at what level it is justifiable or not justifiable at this point, what levels of expenditure would be appropriate in letting Manitobans know what their government is doing in the area of services for children and youth. I guess you could argue either side of that matter. You could suggest that large amounts of money should be expended so that children who are not accessing and families who are not accessing services that benefit children, simply because they do not know of their existence, would certainly benefit if they, through the publicity about the Child and Youth Secretariat and their programs, became aware of those programs. Then there would be a benefit.

I am sure it is open for debate and discussion as to how this should happen. How do you get to families, some of whom are scattered and even transient? How do you get to them when maybe they live in circumstances such that if you were to place something on television, maybe they do not own a television set, maybe they do not read the newspapers, if through things like BabyFirst you are able to get to young families to make them aware of the existence of the Child and Youth Secretariat, what is the best mechanism to do that? This is something that has bothered me for a long time. It seems to me that in Health, for example, the people who need health services the most or preventative services, preventative health issues, wellness issues, the ones that need it the most are the ones that access it the least, the ones who know about it the least.

Even the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation makes it very clear. I remember Frank Maynard was at one time deputy minister of Health and they ran an article on him down east, with his picture in it, that suggested that if you are rich, then you are healthier. It is not a suggestion; it is a fact. As a matter of public profile, the more well-heeled the neighbourhood, the longer the life expectancy of the people who live in that community. The more likely that the members of that community have a higher of education, the less likely it is that the members of that community are finding themselves at the pleasure of Her Majesty in our penal institutions. There is less likelihood that people who are in high income brackets will be in trouble over drug abuse or suicide or alcoholism; all of those indicators, all of those not-so-positive indicators are less prevalent at higher income level-type communities.

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Therefore, these are also people that are most literate, the most informed about what is going on. As you go down the income scale, the results come out quite differently but in quite direct proportion to the income level, all the way to the lowest socioeconomic levels of our society where you have the highest incidence of alcoholism, suicide, substance abuse, families in difficulty, people running into difficulties with the law, all of those things.

Now, that group is the least likely to be aware of what all the government programs are, what all the programs are in the school division, for various reasons. It is not their fault. In some cases some people are struggling to keep the food on the table, keep the family fed. Both parents are working. Sometimes there are not two parents involved; one of them is gone or not available for whatever reason, leaving the single parent with extremely heavy responsibilities. They are so busy, they are just not able to make themselves aware. Or maybe they just do not know how to make themselves aware of all of the government programs that exist. They may feel a lack of empowerment which leaves them in such a condition that they are not likely to even ask anybody what services might be available for themselves or for their children.

So I can recognize the need for publicizing as widely as possible information about programming, but I have also got enough experience to know that targeting is not a bad idea–targeting resources to areas of known need. I realize that you have to have a public health system that is as equitable and equal in all of the five principles of medicare as possible so that you have a statewide, state-run system that is equally available to everybody to the extent you can do that, given geography, that sort of thing. On the other hand, when you are coming out with Family Services programs or Education programs to meet specific needs, I am in favour of targeting resources to areas that need it. We hear people talk about children living in poverty circumstances in our province. What are we doing about that? You do not address that by establishing programs that are accessed by everybody, because programs are accessed by a lot of people anyway. You do not need overall the programming that is available to everybody. You need programming that is targeted to where the need is.

I am in favour of that as a general principle. I remember visiting the Health Sciences Centre one time, the Children's Hospital, and being told that a number of the children coming to that hospital are from remote communities where diet is definitely an issue, and we had young children having all their teeth removed. This is a pretty sad story. Why is that? Not because they are born unhealthy. These children are not given–sometimes they are born underweight, that is a fact. Sometimes from the moment of conception there is a problem with nourishment. In any event, at tender ages, otherwise normal children should not have to be coming to hospital to have all their teeth removed because they are rotten from inapproriate diet or improper diet or not enough diet, not enough nutrition.

That was enough to shock me into understanding that there are issues in our Manitoba population that we need to be addressing, not only as parents but all the way to the level of the government of Manitoba. At that time, Brian Postl was already hard at work on his report, and I thought at the time, I remember thinking, well, it is a good thing Brian Postl is hard at work on his report because these children and others are not getting a fair chance.

Somebody is, either by omission or commission, robbing these children of the chance to have a good life. We have tremendous opportunities here and it is really upsetting to me that there is an inequality of access to those opportunities because of things being done or not being done that are beyond the power of these young children. It is heartbreaking.

So, this is all said to underline my agreement that the work of the Child and Youth Secretariat should be clearly articulated and widely publicized, but how? How is the best way for us to do that? I know that I do not fail to do things simply because of criticism. If that was the case, maybe I would not do anything as a minister or as a member of the government because somebody is going to criticize. That is the wrong reason to stop doing what you are doing. Some people criticize for all the wrong reasons. They do not put the needs of the children ahead of whatever other agenda they are working on.

It might be interesting to the honourable member to know that we have a very strong committee, the overall committee which is providing the interdepartmental response to the Special Education Review. We were very pleased that Carolyn Loeppky is taking on the responsibility of heading up this committee. As the report on special education came to the Minister of Education, clearly it is appropriate that education take the lead here. Carolyn Loeppky is doing that. We also have Eleanor Chornoboy from the Family Services department. Eleanor is the director of Children's Special Services. We also have Doris Mae Oulton, who is the chief executive officer of the Children and Youth Secretariat. We have Marj Watts from the Department of Health. She is the director of interdepartmental and intradepartmental affairs. Adrien DeRuyck is the deputy superintendent for the Manitoba Youth Centre for Department of Justice. Adrien is on that committee as well. A provincial specialist with the Department of Education & Training, Candace Plouffe is also on the Special Education Review interdepartmental response subcommittee.

Now, this committee will be spearheading or leading the whole government and the whole system. I mean, this is the Special Education Review interdepartmental response committee. These are the government people. The people in this committee, Ms. Loeppky in particular, are going to have to find the best ways–and I know she has got all these subcommittees already either set up or in the setting up stage–to bring in the various special education administrators and get their input and some of their staff too right to the level of the teaching assistant. That was the process used in getting the report written. That is going to have to be the process used in getting the report implemented too.

It certainly is not simply for the sake of trying to be inclusive. It just seems that being inclusive is always a good way to do things. The top-down approach that is recommended from time to time, I look at it very carefully, but I just do not think, even as much as I believe the people on this committee are well chosen and knowledgeable experts in the field of education and special requirements, I just never really think that all of the best ideas reside in one place. I think people on the committee would likely want to agree on that point. It simply has been tried and has not worked well enough, because there are too many falling through the cracks. You can take that approach and you are going to have good programs, but there are people who are going to be missed.

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That is why, for example, you have to have a whole lot of people in a government caucus because, as I have learned in my years in this business, there is always a time when every opinion in the room might be very useful in developing a strong consensus on important issues.

So, I hope that has been precise enough for the honourable member. If not, no doubt she will tell me.

Ms. Friesen: I wanted to ask the minister about some general issues in this section of the department. I was a bit puzzled at the beginning where it says: The statutory responsibilities of the Minister of Education and Training. I notice that the Mennonite university act and Brandon University are not included. Sorry, Brandon is, but the Mennonite university I do not think is. Now, is there a reason for that? Has it not been proclaimed? I thought it had. Page 7 of my book.

Mr. McCrae: The honourable member asks a good question here, and we will get an answer in about five minutes for her. If she would like to go on to another one, she will get an answer.

Ms. Friesen: This section of the department represents the minister in national-international education matters. So I am assuming that this section of the department is also the area that has represented the minister on two recent agreements, the Labour Force Agreement with the federal government and the Millennium Scholarships. I wondered if the minister would table the two agreements that have been made with the federal government. Perhaps he could tell me if there are other agreements with the federal government that had been made in the past year that he is prepared to table.

Mr. McCrae: We will take that question under advisement. If the honourable member wants to, Mr. Eliasson, the deputy minister for that part of the department, is just down the hall. I think he is just down the hall, so we will try to get him in here to assist us in dealing with those questions.

Speaking of the Millennium Scholarship agreement, I was very, very happy to be part of that. That is one of the reasons why we like to be in public life, I guess, sometimes. This is a federal initiative which is much appreciated. All the critical things that I can say about the federal government seem to disappear when they wave $10.8 million a year for 10 years in front of your nose, and offer it to your students when you know students are struggling to get through post-secondary education. Even though this year the federal government's budget focus was on health, which is a welcomed thing, to have them back to the table, I mean, we sure need a lot more of their dollars on the table, because they are putting back only a fraction of what they have taken out, causing us no end of grief, not only in the health area but in post-secondary education as well.

Even if we do not want to forgive federal governments for that, we can at least celebrate that there will be thousands of Manitoba students benefiting from the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, and its activities and its money. It is extremely significant. I was happy to join Mr. Norm Riddell [phonetic], executive director of the Millennium Foundation, in announcing the program because with that scholarship it puts us over the top any way you want to look at it.

In college education, we are already the most accessible for ordinary, average Manitobans. Our tuition levels are at the lowest level in the country. In our universities, our tuition levels are either third or fourth overall. Certainly it is third if you take into account the tax credit that is uniquely offered here in Manitoba to Manitoba post-secondary students. So I have mixed feelings obviously about things like this, because it is not nice for Manitobans to have $263 million removed from our ability to finance needed services in the health and post-secondary education sectors. It is not nice to take all those millions away from Manitobans, and then, of course, we are left at the mercy–we have had to make that up and we have done so, which has not been an easy thing to do, to backfill all the dollars taken out of our system by the federal government. That has not been easy.

But now to see the federal government returning in some small measure to the table is encouraging. I hope it is a trend that will continue. I do not say it to be overly critical because I believe the federal government has had its challenges. It has decided to change its ways and stop living on borrowed money and their grandchildren's future. The federal government has agreed to stop doing that, which is something I support. So I do not want to be misunderstood here, because I know that the federal government has significant challenge. Yet they have a responsibility for health and post-secondary education under the Canada Health and Social Transfer, so I am not going to complain too loudly when they begin to return money to the Health coffers, but what about Education?

That is the next question. Every time there is a dollar on the table, there is always a question of, well, where is the next dollar going to come from and where it is going to be directed? I am very interested, and I have made this known to my federal colleagues. I think the Premier is going to be doing the same thing, probably rather more effectively than I am able to do, make it clear that post-secondary education is one of the keys to the future of a prosperous and successful and happy Manitoba.

So I am dropping that hint at every opportunity, that maybe next budget we can get some continued support for Health, but some returned support for post-secondary education so that we can address more effectively, even more effectively, I should say, because I think colleges and universities are addressing as effectively as can be reasonably expected, given all the exigencies of modern-day life here in Canada. I do believe we would like to have more federal participation. Having said all that, I appreciate from the bottom of my heart the extension of this scholarship program for at least 10 years, making it $108 million that Manitoba students are going to be able to access through scholarships and bursaries, either on the general side, which is based on need, or on the merit side, which is based on having earned scholarships.

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Now, I see my deputy minister for this part of the Health department, Mr. Hugh Eliasson, is joining us.

Floor Comment: . . . Education.

Mr. McCrae: What did I say?

Floor Comment: Health.

Mr. McCrae: Health? Did I say Health? That was because we were talking about Health a minute ago, a couple of minutes, 15 minutes ago.

We will, of course, be making available to the honourable member the agreement with the federal government regarding the labour matters as well as the one respecting the Millennium Scholarship foundation agreement. With respect to the Mennonite university not showing up in the Supplementary Estimates, that was not intended that way. That is an oversight. That document was put together fairly quickly, near the end, at least, near the end, I say, in order to get it–

Ms. Friesen: In order to give me two hours notice, I know. I appreciate it.

Mr. McCrae: Well, that does not sound like appreciation. You see, it was only moments before that we made that available that the House leaders worked out the list. As the honourable member knows, and I know this because I was a House leader, once between the years 1988 and 1990 and the second time in the years '97 and '98, I know that the government House leader keeps prodding the opposition House leader, when will you give me the first, when will you give me–if you look in the rules, you will see that the way it is done is that the House leaders get together to devise this list for the examination of the Estimates. The government House leader cannot do a darn thing until the opposition House leader gets the ball rolling.

Well, my experience, and this is not any criticism of anybody, least of all the opposition House leader, with whom I enjoy an excellent working relationship, that first move has to get made by the opposition. So to speak critically or to say that two hours notice or to draw attention to that in the way the honourable member has gets me feeling defensive, because the fact is, I got that supplementary information to the honourable member just as quickly as I could after learning of the order of Estimates review.

Ms. Friesen: I think election schedules had a little more to do with it than the minister would allow in his answer. Certainly I think he knew that if Estimates was to take place, then Education Estimates were to be part of it. I understand the minister to say that he will be tabling the two agreements that I asked for with the Millennium Foundation and with the federal government.

I wanted to ask the minister about the Council of Ministers of Education, now that he has both deputies here, but I believe the Council of Ministers has been addressing post-secondary education. I wonder if the minister could give us a summary of the agendas and the kinds of discussion that have taken place as they affect Manitoba.

Mr. McCrae: With respect to the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, of which I am a member, I will be sharing with the honourable member information about the projects that are presently underway with the council and the members and officials. Now, the honourable member knows, I think, how that system works. There must be hundreds of people involved in all of the activities related to the work of the council, but I would be happy tomorrow to bring forward for the honourable member a status report on what is before it, what it has been doing lately, what it is hoping to do in the near future, and that type of information.

Ms. Friesen: I wanted to ask about the national testing programs that have taken place in Manitoba, if the minister could give me a summary of what has taken place in the past year. I know that he has released some of the results, but I do not necessarily think that they have been tabled documents and hence sort of part of the continuous public record. So I wondered if those results could be tabled.

Mr. McCrae: Yes, we will include that type of information when we discuss this with the honourable member tomorrow.

Ms. Friesen: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The minister has made an agreement with Morris-MacDonald School Division for training Biana Keewin [phonetic], and the press release that the minister had suggested that changes would be required in regulation. I wonder if the minister could just give us the details of that.

Mr. McCrae: I am going to ask the honourable member if she can recall what I have said about regulation because we are not interested in regulations that are not needed. I might at some point–I could see myself, or hear myself, saying something to the effect: I wonder if any regulatory change is required to help facilitate this unique sort of thing. If that is what it was–

An Honourable Member: Mental meandering.

Mr. McCrae: Okay, mental meandering, as my penultimate predecessor or double penultimate, or whatever it is, predecessor suggests. I do not know at this point, and I certainly will bring myself up to date. I do not know of any regulations coming forward, this, I believe, to be a somewhat unique arrangement that exists. Because of that, it occurred to me at some point that, oh, I wonder if any regulations might be required. If there are, I will certainly share that with the honourable member, but I do not know of any right off the top of my head.

Ms. Friesen: Off the top of my head, Mr. Chairman, I cannot remember the exact wording, but it was, I think, in the last paragraph of the press release indicating that this would not take place immediately as, i.e., the next day, but that there would be certain changes that would be needed, and I wondered what kinds of changes. Is it regulation? Is it changes to The Public Schools Act? What level of changes did the minister, or whoever wrote the press release, think was required in this?

I know that there have been other occasions where training has been subcontracted, and the department may have dealt with it in different ways at different times. So I am wondering if the department is setting out a general policy here of the subcontracting of training from public school divisions. That is my general issue.

Mr. Chairperson: The honourable minister has 40 seconds to respond.

Mr. McCrae: Very quickly, in my 40 seconds, I do not know of any regulatory changes that are required with respect to this specific private-public arrangement. However, the landscape is changing so fast because of the opportunities presented to us by technological change that one simply does not know today–I do not know today what accommodations might have to be made for useful education opportunities in the future. That is all I can say at this moment.

With respect to this specific one, I do not know of any regulation change needed at this point.

Mr. Chairperson: Order, please. The hour now being 5 p.m., committee rise.