Mr. Chairperson (Marcel Laurendeau): Good afternoon. Would the Committee of Supply come to order, please. This section of the Committee of Supply has been dealing with the Estimates of the Department of Education. Would the minister's staff please enter the Chamber at this time.

We are on Resolution 16.1 Administration and Finance (c) Planning and Policy Co-ordination (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits $354,300 on page 33 of the Estimates book.

Is there leave for the honourable member for Crescentwood to ask his questions from the front seat? [agreed]

Mr. Tim Sale (Crescentwood): When I had the privilege of serving in the Department of Education, I had some dealings with the Council of Ministers of Education, sat on a number of its committees and worked specifically in an area. I wanted to ask the minister if she could update the committee on what has happened in that area. We were developing at that time--well, it was to be a series of publications with Statistics Canada and a joint project of the council of ministers and Statistics Canada. There were, I think, initially three annual volumes prepared that I have seen, but since that time that project does not seem to have moved forward from simply the advance statistics, which I think the minister actually has a copy of in front of her at this point. It seems that there is only one publication a year, if that, whether it is even annually.

The initial plan was that this was to become a much more expansive project that would in the long run subsume a great deal of the educational research publishing that Statistics Canada does. The hope, at least initially, when I was part of that working group was that there would be a much more major effort, I guess, over a period of time to pull together the council, the ministers across the country and StatsCan.

I would appreciate an update on the degree to which that objective has been achieved or partially achieved or, perhaps, not achieved.

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Hon. Linda McIntosh (Minister of Education and Training): Mr. Chairman, I thank the member for the question. Apparently, the initiative that he had discussed or was asking about ran into some difficulties in its early stages. The initial agreement, I am given to understand, ran into difficulty as to its focus. So the council then did a strategic planning initiative across Canada with all the provinces. The net result of that was the Canadian Education Stats Council, which put out some stats, but there was still a sense that the stats were disaggregated, that it was too slow in coming out and that they still were not giving information that the provinces could really use effectively.

So what has now been agreed upon, sort of the step 3 or phase 3 of this evolution, is that Stats Canada itself, with the agreement and input from the council, will develop a centre for educational statistics along the line of the justice model that they use for justice. It is felt that would address the problems or the insufficiencies that were identified in the first two attempts. If you need more detail, I will try to give you that.

The background here and the history predated me, but the current process they are entering is fairly familiar.

Mr. Sale: Is the proposal then that the CMEC will essentially stop doing statistical publication work and that this will become something akin to the Centre for Justice Statistics, and basically that will be the Canadian source rather than having two sources which were not necessarily in sync?

Mrs. McIntosh: That is correct, and the only difference would be that there might from time to time be some particular project that the ministers themselves decide they want to do that is over and above that, but it is felt that this would be the vehicle through which the statistical analysis and data would be gathered regarding educational initiatives. The answer is, basically, yes.

Mr. Sale: I am glad to have that clarified. It is distressing that, from 1987 until 1997 is a whole decade, and I think we were quite hopeful that StatsCan, Ivan Fellegi, and I have forgotten Kathy's last name, but she was the director of that branch of tourism and education statistics. We really thought we might be able to get some decent information about Canadian education outcomes and critical policy-relevant data, and I was disappointed to see that happen.

I am always hopeful that StatsCan will continue to do the good work that it has sometimes done in the past, but it has not done a good job, in my view, in education statistics at all. I would just, without wanting to make a partisan comment--no Minister of Education, so far as I know across this country, has solid outcomes data of any kind even yet. We do not really know the retention rate in Manitoba. We do not really know the drop-out rate, because we do not know the drop back in rate.

We have lousy measures of literacy and numeracy. We have the private-sector study such as the Southam study of three or four years ago telling us that 20 or 30 percent of our young people are functionally illiterate based on their study. Yet we have many, many excellent educators, including members of the staff of the department and superintendents of school divisions, saying that, in fact, no more than 5 percent of the graduates of our high school system are functionally illiterate and that that is quite amazing given that the level of learning disabilities and functional impairment is usually argued to exceed 5 percent. So, for as long as we have been in the business, which is 100 years in Manitoba, 120 years, we have not had the kind of reliable data. It disappoints me that StatsCan and the council were not able to work out a program that would have given ministers solid policy-relevant data.

My question to the minister in this case is, and she and I were talking in the hall earlier about a new government, and she expressed some hopes that there might be some people on the end of the phone now that might be just a tad more responsive than they were in the past. Is the province, or are the ministers collectively, considering putting a clear framework of expectations around what StatsCan would do and what the province's view of policy-relevant data would be? What would be that data set? What do you want StatsCan to be able to tell us on a reliable, longitudinal basis so that we finally will have good data on which to make the difficult policy choices that governments across the country have to make?

Very specifically, I am really troubled by the continuing, I think it is misinformation but that may be too strong a term, concerning the quality of the outcome of our education system, because I simply do not accept the notion that we have functional illiteracy rates of 25 percent and 30 percent of kids coming out of high school. I simply do not believe that to be the case. Yet I know the minister has no other data source than those kinds of studies at this point, and when we talk about dropout and completion rates, I do not believe that 25 percent or 30 percent are dropping out of Grade 12, and yet that seems to be the only data we have--old StatsCan data. I am very concerned. So the specific question, Mr. Chairperson, is: Has the government or have the governments collectively taken forward a position to StatsCan about what would constitute an adequate data set?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, again, the short answer is yes to the question the member has asked. We want to have data that will be useful to us in helping us plan policy, and when we see solid news printing something that says 25 percent illiteracy rate, like the member opposite I question that. That is a piece of information that in and of itself does not provide usefulness in terms of how to address what kinds of illiteracy, what the causes are, et cetera, et cetera. I do not believe that some of the learning disabled people are illiterate, and there are some assumptions that are built into illiteracy when they do all of this statistical reporting that is not made clear. You know, what are they looking at? Just because you may be dyslexic does not mean you are illiterate. It may mean you are a very bad speller, but it does not necessarily mean that you cannot read or that you are functionally illiterate. It may mean that it is going to take you a lot longer and that you will not maybe excel, but it does not mean you are functionally illiterate.

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On the other hand, we do need to get a handle on where we need to direct our resources for people who have left school and may not be able to read and write to a level that enables them to function. So we are--and ministers across the nation have talked about this and are concerned about this and are hoping very much that the agreement we now have with Stats Canada will give us an improved reporting system.

The member mentioned Kathy Campbell [phonetic]. I think that is whom you mentioned. She is no longer there, so I have not had the chance to meet her. The new staff people who are there, hopefully, will be there for some time to come now, and we will not have turnovers so we can get some consistency in following through. Hopefully, we will have ministers stay for longer periods of time as well, because we were having turnovers as ministers were coming in and going out. I noticed the last couple of meetings we have actually had the same ministers, which has been good for consistency sake in terms of guiding the work that is being done there. They have had an internal readjustment at StatsCan, we have been told, and we have had a cordial relationship with them, with CMEC, but they are reinventing themselves and that is leading them to reinvent their relationship with us as well. That means giving a new mandate via the council.

So in essence, the Centre for Education Statistics, which it is being called, will take its direction from the council. That is chaired by Ivan Fellegi and John Carlyle. They are deputies on behalf of the CMEC ministers, and they will have a large say. So our own deputy is one of those two.

Just a little additional piece of information that might be of interest. We have a little booklet called Profile of Elementary and Secondary Education in Manitoba, that is going out. Has it been released yet? It has gone out just recently, that contains provincial K to S4 statistics. Do you have a copy of it? Okay, so you are familiar with it.

That little booklet is a start. It is an indication of the kind of desire we have to put data, statistics, figures and so on out to the field so they have an awareness as well. We hope to expand the contents of that booklet each year so that we can move into the release of contextual and indicator information, and all kinds of other data that we think the field might be interested in receiving. That is locally, provincially and, of course, we do have the national project SAIP, et cetera, that is in addition to our work with StatsCan.

We are also working as a national co-ordinator for the OECD's international students' outcomes project which is, again, not local or national but international.

We have had some good support, which we very much appreciate, from the stakeholder organizations here. When I say that, I generally mean the four; MTS, MASS, MAST and MASBO. They have offered to help in working through any privacy and confidentiality concerns that might arise as we get into dissemination of statistics and data. We appreciate that input, and we will be using them to help us with those two concerns.

If the member has more, we will try to answer them again.

Mr. Sale: Mr. Chairperson, with respect, the minister did not answer the question I asked very specifically, which was: Is the department going to define a statistical data set that it wishes, hopefully in conjunction with other departments across the country, that will set expectations for StatsCan so that there will be, finally, some agreement about what data are wanted and what the policy relevance of those data are?

She references the little publication which she says is a start. The difficulty is almost every Department of Education across the country puts out something like that. I think Quebec was the first province to do it in the mid-'80s. In fact, about 1984 they started, I believe, but there is no consistency of either design or statistical base across the country at all. Probably Quebec still has the most comprehensive publication, although Alberta and Ontario both have good publications too. Ours is very modest by comparison.

The fundamental question is: We have had a decade now, more than a decade of discussions which have gone, I do not think it is unfair to say, nowhere. I do not think we have published very much that is fresh for 1997 that was not pretty much available in 1988-89. I do not lay that particularly at the council ministers' or at StatsCan's door, but the bottom line is nothing has happened here to speak of.

Is this a resource problem? I do not know, but the minister is saying we are making another fresh start. StatsCan is committed, but what are they committed to do? Our experience with them in education, and I have had some experience with them in other fields, is that they are not very open to somebody else's ideas about policy-relevant data. They tend to have a fairly closed-shop view of the world. They think they do know how to do their work, and they do not much like questions from others to interrupt their day.

So I am glad to know that Mr. Carlyle is a co-chair with Ivan Fellegi. Are we actually going to have some expectations on the record? Would the minister be prepared to share with Manitobans what it is she thinks is the policy-relevant data set that she would want to be available through the work of StatsCan, so that we might all get involved in saying let us get this done finally, let us finally make some progress?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I had indicated when I first responded that the short answer to the question is yes. In terms of yes, we will be asking for the data, the specific question you asked and then fleshed out with detail the fact that it is Ivan and John who are going to be leading as co-chairs from CMEC, and that StatsCan was reinventing itself, which included its relationship with us, which was my tactful way of trying to indicate that we will be giving them specific direction.

We will be prescribing data sets and indicators, and the CESC will define the data set and set the policy. StatsCan will be the contractor. We do not have all of the things that we will be asking for yet because the ministers, once again, will have to be giving direction to the committee, but I do have a few that I can indicate to you that the deputy is just looking for here right now.

But that rocky road you talk about, and I agree with you, I did not realize how long back it had been, but I know that in talking about putting out the report on education that the ministers put out last year, there was a lot of discussion at that time, okay, we want to put out a report on education. We had great deliberations over a report on education which I thought when it went out was fine, but it was not in depth. It was more just a sort of a general overview and not the kind of in-depth analysis that people might want if they were going to do research or establish policy. It was more of an interesting piece for laypeople to get a quick photograph. There was not the kind of detail in that that the member is asking for or that we would require. I knew they had the little bits of trying and not succeeding, then now this, what I call, third attempt.

The deputy has just handed me a short list of some of the things that we will be asking for. This is not an exhaustive list because the ministers, as time goes on, will be constantly identifying, but just a preliminary short list of the types of things would be: academic achievement, citizenship satisfaction, consumer satisfaction, et cetera, with the system, school to work--like a school to work transition, student mobility, accessibility; those kinds of items.

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One thing that has been talked an awful lot about with the ministers is this whole business of mobility. I do not just mean student mobility, but mobility of professionals as well, and those kinds of things. We are seeing effects from people moving a lot, and we would like to get a handle on the impact of that. We would like to have it be so that ultimately a student could move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction without losing--having gaps in instruction or finding they move some place, they have already learned something that he has not learned or she has not learned or vice versa. Kids who move around a lot are subject to that.

So those are some of the types of items that we would be asking for from StatsCan, but that is by no means an exhaustive list. Does the deputy have some more there?

There is one that is being developed and it is the academic achievement. That one, it is one indicator at CMEC, that is, academic achievement as found in SAIP, the Student Achievement Indicators Project which the member may be familiar with. That project, which actually has been helpful in identifying certain components of learning that need to be stressed is with 13- and 16-year-olds. It is not done by grade; it is done by age. So all 13-year-olds will take a math exam, or a language, or a science. Those are the three areas for the SAIP tests. Similarly, so will 16-year-olds. We found very useful information out of that. For example, we discovered that the traditional gap for girls in learning science at age 13 has disappeared, that the science tests given this year for 13-year-olds in Canada showed something that education in Canada has been striving to achieve--not just in Canada but in North America as well--that girls be encouraged to excel in science. This test showed for the first time nationwide that there was no discernible difference between the achievement of boys and girls at age 13.

That is a very useful thing for us to know, because it indicates with some indicators that some of the encouraging work to inspire girls has been successful. But it also showed that, by age 16, when the 16-year-olds were tested at the same time, that there was still the gap for the 16-year-old girls. The girls were behind the boys in science. So we can see then, we were able to learn then when the progress had been made, because if the 16-year-old girls were still behind and the 13-year-olds were not, then in those three years, somebody had been doing something right in the schools to encourage girls.

That kind of information is coming through. The other thing we have learned is that mathematically, and this is something again that provinces are working on because it seemed to come right across the nation that the French Immersion mass, there was a discrepancy. They were lower. We are looking at possible reasons for that. One could be that because the language skills are acquired first, that it levels off. We know that, in the lower grades, for example, the English skills, you will see the learning curve go out fairly straight and then take a sharp rise. We may find with the math, we need to look at that as well and make sure that is the reason, that it is a lag time that does eventually catch up, and that it is not a permanent behind situation. So we are getting some information from those SAIP, academic achievement indicators, through the statistical data done at CMEC, that is extremely useful. That is just one project, and there are dozens that we should be doing that are not in place yet.

Mr. Chairperson: Shall the item pass? The item is accordingly passed.

16.1(c)(2) Other Expenditures $127,200--pass; (d) Human Resource Services $384,400.

Mrs. McIntosh: While staff is on its way, if I could table some information that we discussed the other day. The member had asked for some material on the year-over-year expenditure patterns, and we said we would go back and get the information. I have that here. I could perhaps simply table it and then she could ask me later or I could table it and she could ask me now, whichever she is most comfortable doing. It is this whole package here.

I am pleased to introduce Mr. Jack Gillespie who has joined us. Jack Gillespie is director of Human Resource Services for the Department of Education and Training.

Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): I wanted to ask about the situation in the Apprenticeship department where last year, I believe 13 people were let go, redeployed, fired, whatever euphemism is used. Some were hired back, and I believe there has been an unsettled personnel situation since then in the Apprenticeship branch. I wondered if the minister could give us a sense of how many people were actually let go and what the reasons were, what the implications have been for apprenticeship programs, and what the situation is at the moment in personnel terms in the Apprenticeship branch.

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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Gillespie is checking on that information now and he will be providing it to me in just a moment. I just indicate to the member that, in any department as large as this one, we will have periodic adjustments in the labour force, and many of those people whose jobs are changed or not required do relocate within the department to other positions. I have to commend Mr. Gillespie, personally as well, for the personal commitment he makes to people whose jobs are changing in that he spends a lot of personal time with them helping them successfully redeploy, relocate or adjust to changed conditions in their particular job.

The Apprenticeship branch, as the member knows, the federal government has withdrawn completely from its purchase of seats, has completely withdrawn all its apprenticeship money. Hence, we have had the Apprenticeship task force that has just completed some work. It has made recommendations to us that we are looking at. Whether or not that will alter the way in which the Apprenticeship staff functions is too early to say, but in terms of the particular numbers for the Apprenticeship branch, Mr. Gillespie has just advised me that this is the Advanced Education component of the department.

The member makes reference to numbers last year, '96-97. It is not with the K to Senior 4 side of the department. We will have to get the actual numbers, which we will do, because we do not have the advanced education component here today. We were thinking of K to Senior 4. But just as an overall indicator, many of those employees have already been redeployed. All persons are assigned a case manager, and we were able to find placements for them rather quickly.

We will get the actual numbers, but I just indicate that when a person receives a layoff notice it does not necessarily mean that they get laid off. It just is an indication of an adjustment that is being made in the department for a variety of reasons, and it indicates and signals that redeployment may well take place or a transfer to some other position. In this case, we were able to find placements quickly, and a lot of that is due to the effort put forward by Human Resources in the department.

Ms. Friesen: Well, I understood that this section of the department dealt with all human resource services, areas, and I am quoting from the Estimates here: Areas of conflict or potential conflict between management and staff.

I am not clear why the minister, with the staff here, is not able to answer the questions about the loss of personnel in the Apprenticeship department. It was the largest single reduction in the department, and as I understand it, and this is why I am asking, it is not clear how many were hired back. There was an initial firing of X number, and then there was a rehiring of Y, and I am wondering if the minister could put those numbers on the record and give us a sense of what the implications have been for Human Resources, for job allocation, for ability to deal with the programs of the Apprenticeship department.

I notice that the minister gives the argument of the federal withdrawal and, yes, that is true, but it is also true that the department has taken on an added responsibility. The firing of 13 or 15 staff, however many it was, at the time when it was anticipated that the provincial government must take the place of the federal withdrawal, it seems to me quite unexpected.

The minister also says there are periodic adjustments within departments. Yes, that is also true, but this was about a third of the staff. So a periodic adjustment, which had application to a third of the staff, also does not seem to me to be the only response possible. So I ask again for the specific numbers and for how in fact the government can expect to take on the job of apprenticeship training and apprenticeship issues with staff which is about a third less than it used to be.

Mrs. McIntosh: The member is quite right. Human Resources is for the entire department, and we are currently going through the K to S4 staff. We could get the information. First of all, she is asking questions on last year's Estimates, not this year's. We do not have last year's work here. That is for starters. Secondly, she is asking about a program that is in Advanced Education and Training.

While Human Resources covers both, we were under the impression, at least I was, doing K to Senior 4, so we do not have all the Apprenticeship figures here. I do have, and I can indicate to the member, some information. I have indicated the actual numbers will be brought forward to her here, but I can indicate that she has made some assumptions that perhaps should not be taken as fact. She is assuming that we have fewer people around to deal with Apprenticeship, when I think it is pretty clear from reading that we have combined Workforce 2000 and Apprenticeship and reduced, which I would think the member would have noticed because it is an important issue to her that we are no longer doing the Workforce 2000 for individual companies on a regular program as we were before. Those two staffs have been combined. It is called Workforce 2000 and Apprenticeship. I think the member knows that. So to assume, then, that all of the people in there are going to be--the Workforce 2000 people are going to be sitting there with nothing to do when they are now combined with Apprenticeship is a wrong assumption.

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I would also indicate that I have last year--she is asking last year's statistics--and I will indicate that I have some information from last year still here. That was March 5, 1996, over a year ago. There were 43 people who were verbally notified that their positions were impacted under the workforce adjustment process. The member is talking about last year, longer than a year ago. Thirty-six of those people were given a layoff date. They were not fired. They were given a layoff date. Two were scheduled for a September layoff date, and five people were notified their positions would become part time rather than full time.

As of a year ago, as of the end of that month, in 1996, 22 people had already been placed in permanent positions. Nine people had been placed in term positions. One person had elected to retire, and two people had said that they would accept the immediate layoff and do other things. One person was not issued a letter of layoff because she went on long-term disability. As of a very short period of time after those 43 people were served their verbal notice, there were only five people at that time not placed, and that was a year ago. I do not have the figures from after March '96, to indicate where those five people have been placed, but when the member says they were fired and then rehired, she is wrong. They were given layoff notices and redeployed. That was to comply with civil service regulations. Civil service regulations require there be a notification period that way. I think the member supports the human services requirements, and we will go back and get last year's Estimates figures since she has asked for them in Apprenticeship, which is our advanced training. I do not need to have the deputy for that here, although it would be preferred if I did. Mr. Gillespie can handle that.

We can also deal with, if the member wishes, under the Apprenticeship, I am not sure what number it is, when we have all of the staff involved with Apprenticeship here so that I can get more than just the number of people. But we will get the number of layoffs from Apprenticeship before the end of the day today, and the figures that we will be talking about will be the '96-97, but we certainly are not expecting the job in Apprenticeship to be done with fewer people, because we do have that combined workforce now. We also have an Apprenticeship review, which I indicated to the member will give us suggestions as to a new way to set up delivery of Apprenticeship if we feel it is appropriate, in light of the fact that we have no federal support anymore.

I just wanted to make sure those assumptions that appeared to be in her question were corrected, and we will provide that other information for her.

Ms. Friesen: The minister should be careful not to read assumptions into my questions. My questions were for numbers, and I can appreciate the minister does not have the numbers here, and I appreciate her willingness to table those numbers.

Mrs. McIntosh: You said we had fewer staff and we could not do the job.

Ms. Friesen: I said it would be unusual to have fewer staff to do a job which was much larger. [interjection]

Mr. Chairperson: Order, please. Could I ask both honourable members, if they are going to put some comments, to come through the Chair and to wait until they are recognized before they put anything on the record.

The honourable member for Wolseley, to pose her question.

Ms. Friesen: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If we accept the minister's explanation that there are the same numbers of people to do a job, which has expanded, in part as a result of federal cutbacks, could the minister tell us in this section of Human Resources what training has been provided to those people who previously did not deal with Apprenticeship and now are expected to?

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, and we do accept that the minister is meaning what she says, and I suppose that I am making an assumption when the member says if we accept what the minister says, that by implication or assumption, she is implying that we should not accept what the minister says. Of course, that is exactly what she is doing.

I have indicated to the member, and perhaps she might care to listen very carefully to this answer. We have a task force, which has just reported, which is giving us recommendations on how Apprenticeship should be delivered in Manitoba. Should we accept those recommendations then we will have a new model for the delivery of Apprenticeship in Manitoba. We will then know how many staff we require and what kinds of roles they should fulfill.

The reason I suggest the member listen closely is that I have now said this three times, indicating that it is not possible for me to say at this time how many people we will require until we know what kind of model we are going to use or what kind of delivery service we are going to be providing.

Now perhaps if she could tell me how I could know how many people I will require when I do not yet have a model, I would be amazed, for starters. We would certainly simplify our job here.

You see, our problem is we like to plan before we hire so that we know exactly who we need. We also like to plan before we assign staff positions so that they are properly assigned. I think the people of Manitoba would rather like us to plan before we assign people or to decide how many people we need. Because we have a study before us that will suggest changes to us, I think it would be wise for us to consider that report and those recommendations before we begin assigning staff or before we begin making the assumptions that I thought I heard in the member's question when she said: How can you do this job with fewer people when you really need more people? To me, there was a bit of an assumption in that question, a very large one.

I say to the member, again, that perhaps I am mishearing her when she asks how can we do more work with fewer people. I think she is meaning that we have more work and fewer people. I think most people listening would probably think that too. I am saying to her, we do not know yet the degree of work that we are going to have or the number of people or the types of jobs that will be required. But we will get her the number on what we have in place right now in knowing what we are delivering right now. In anticipation of the recommendations being studied, accepted, modified or rejected, we may, in fact, down the road, be looking at a different way of delivering this.

I would be pleased to share with her our views and ideas when that comes, but I do not think that the implication I hear her making that we are not paying attention to this issue in some way, and again, I am making an assumption which I am sure the member would say is wrong, I do not accept that assumption if it is being made.

We have a task force that has reported. We are looking at their recommendations now. They will be looking at the number of challenges we face, including the elimination of federal funding. I am not blaming last year's reductions on the federal funding. I was explaining to the member that, because of the federal funding we have undergone this review which will, amongst other things, offer to us recommendations on delivery which may affect the number of people. As I explained to the member, last year's Estimates about which she is asking questions this year, involved combining Workforce 2000, which she did not like and I am sure would be glad to see us get rid of a component of that with Apprenticeship, and therefore not requiring as many people.

There are a number of things going on with Apprenticeship. We have seen a continued increase in the number of new apprentices over each of the past four fiscal years, and this is a good thing. It may be possible to deliver Apprenticeship in absence of federal support in a more effective way, in a better way, and maybe even in a more cost-efficient way to more people. That would be our goal.

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Ms. Friesen: The issue we are dealing with here is Human Resources. My concerns were for the Apprenticeship branch which, as I understood it initially and perhaps completely, lost about a third of its people. The minister argues that the number remained the same because other programs were collapsed and a joint branch was set up.

My question dealt with the past, and that is: Those people who now were put into a position of dealing with Apprenticeship, what kind of training was received by those people in order to prepare them for this new role?

Mrs. McIntosh: The member has asked a new question that she had not asked before. I am pleased to provide the answer that we have through Human Resources, because we do not have the Apprenticeship people here. It is Advanced Education and the training that they do on the job. I do not have those answers here. As far as the Human Resources are concerned, the combined workforce that was created is a highly skilled workforce and the aptitudes and abilities were in the skill sets of the people in that new combined grouping. As the people moved into new sets of duties, we did reduce the number of directors, I think, from eight to five, and made other more common-sense combinations of disciplines.

The day-to-day work in the job, of course, is done by the people there. But they went in with a skill set that was very useful and appropriate for their--consolidation is the right word. As I indicated, of the people who were verbally notified to comply with civil service guidelines, their positions were impacted under that adjustment a year and a half ago. We are talking last year's Estimates, that the member wishes to go through again at this time, that within a month of them receiving those, all but five people were successfully placed in other positions, and the people currently working in Apprenticeship have done an outstanding job.

I am not personally familiar with the kind of on-the-job training they might have received from their directors. We can deal with that when we get to Apprenticeship, but I think that Human Resources placed people well in terms of their aptitudes, abilities and interests. That is what they do.

If you want to know specifically the new day-to-day operations of Apprenticeship, we can do that when we get to that section in Advanced Education, but I can tell you that they have been working very hard, everybody working very hard as we move to a new model. That involves a lot of people working with the task force, with the advisory council, with the trade advisory committees.

We have had six new trades designated in Manitoba in the last year. They have been done very successfully, and the people who are doing them appear to be very well equipped to do that, because we have had many letters of compliment.

So when we get to the section on Apprenticeship we can give you more detail on the day-to-day operations and exactly how those people acquired their knowledge, but Human Resources placed them in the consolidated workforce with a very good set of skills that were applicable for the jobs that the people were being assigned to do.

Ms. Friesen: As I understand the minister, she is saying no special training was required, because the skill sets were all that the new jobs required. I wonder if the minister could tell us what managerial--

Mr. Chairperson: Order, please. The honourable minister, on a point of order?

Mrs. McIntosh: No, no, just the member has incorrectly--she has misheard an answer. Maybe if she reads Hansard, she will see it more clearly. What I said, and I think it is important, because she has made a comment, sounded a little, tiny bit sarcastic, tongue in cheek, but I would not want to give that as a--it did sound like that, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chairperson: The honourable minister does not have a point of order. It is clearly a dispute over the facts.

Mrs. McIntosh: No, no, it is not. I want to correct the answer. She has repeated my answer incorrectly.

Mr. Chairperson: The honourable minister can correct that when the honourable member for Wolseley is finished putting her question. The minister can respond to that question at that time. At this time we will allow the honourable member to conclude her question.

The honourable member for Wolseley, to conclude her question, please.

Ms. Friesen: I was trying to summarize what I believed to be an accurate statement of what the minister said and accepting what the minister said. My question was to ask about another aspect of the Department of Human Resources, which is managerial effectiveness, to ask what kind of staff training has been done throughout the department in managerial effectiveness in the past year.

Mrs. McIntosh: I think it is very important, when I state clearly the answer to a question and the member summarizes it incorrectly, and, I suspect, knowingly incorrectly, to leave a false impression, when the member does that, Mr. Chairman, I think it is important that it be corrected immediately rather than left to stand in Hansard for a whole series of paragraphs before it is corrected.

Mr. Chairperson: Order, please. The honourable member for Crescentwood (Mr. Sale), on a point of order.

Mr. Sale: Mr. Chairperson, we have had a reasonably civil discussion here this afternoon. The minister just said that the member for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen) intended to leave a false impression on the record. I believe she said, I think intentionally. I believe she has no grounds for that statement, that it is not appropriate. She should withdraw it, and we should go back to having the kind of civil exchange that I think has been going on. The words were, I believe, intentionally.

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Mr. Chairperson: I am going to take the member for Crescentwood's point of order under advisement so I can peruse Hansard just to clarify the statement.

The honourable minister, on the same point of order.

Mrs. McIntosh: Point of order, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairperson: Order, please. I have already taken that point of order under advisement.

Mrs. McIntosh: May I speak on that point of order?

Mr. Chairperson: No, I have already taken that one under advisement.

Mrs. McIntosh: I am not allowed to give my point's consideration for--

Mr. Chairperson: I will allow the honourable minister to put her points on it, and I will review it at that time. The honourable minister.

Mrs. McIntosh: On the point of order?

Mr. Chairperson: On the point of order.

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, I indicated that I believe, and I do believe that, Mr. Chairman, that there are often summaries that are made by that particular member, and in this case I believe it was a conscious summary: So the minister did not feel the members needed any new training. I believe that that was done consciously, and I would ask you to take that into consideration when you consider the point.

Mr. Chairperson: I thank the honourable minister for confirming what is on Hansard. At this time I no longer have to take it under advisement. I would ask the honourable minister to take off the record that the member was intentionally directing the House. If the honourable minister wants to challenge the member within her statements, that is fine, but it is not proper to intentionally say that she has misled the room, so I would ask the honourable minister to retract that statement, please.

Mrs. McIntosh: I said I believed that she did that. It is a statement of opinion.

Mr. Chairperson: I would ask the honourable minister to just take off--from what I understood from what the minister and the member for Crescentwood were saying, you were saying that the member for Wolseley was intentionally putting something on the record. I would ask the honourable minister to remove that from the record.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, out of respect for the Chair, I will withdraw the comment.

Mr. Chairperson: I thank the honourable minister.

Mr. Chairperson: Now, the honourable minister, to conclude her response.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I hope that we will indeed be able to get back to civilized discussion. We had a very good exchange the other day. The member did not resort to any sort of tones of voice or anything like that, and we had a really good exchange, and I hope that we can do that today as well because I think it is better for everybody involved if we could avoid those kinds of comments, those kinds of--well, you know what I am talking about, Jean. Here we go.

The answer to this question is that we had eight individuals laid off, one supervisor--this is the information the member was asking--two Apprenticeship counsellors and five administrators.

I do have my Apprenticeship people here if the member wanted to go straight into Apprenticeship, then we could go into the kind of training the members did receive because clearly in my answer to her I said that whatever training the members had received, they had received on the job in their new assignment and that Human Resources had not done the training, because Human Resources had placed them with all of the skill sets and all of the potential and capability required for that job. Any other things they needed specifically would be picked up in the workforce itself. I could not give her those details until I had the Apprenticeship people here to talk about what kind of training had occurred in the workplace itself. That is what I said.

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I did not say: So the minister says they did not need any training. That is not what I said. It is an incorrect summary, and I hope that people reading this will go back in Hansard to where you summarized it, where the member summarized it, Mr. Chairman, incorrectly. I can only conclude that she did not hear my first three answers on that and therefore summarized it incorrectly because obviously she would not do it intentionally or sarcastically. And I hope that we will not go through the kind of session we went through last year; we will have a nice one this time.

The managerial improvements' opportunities this past year in kindergarten to Senior 4 and post-secondary--

Mr. Chairperson: The committee will take a five-minute recess.

The committee recessed at 3:47 p.m.

The committee resumed at 3:52 p.m.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, to complete my question, the member had asked what managerial improvement opportunities took place this past year. Now she is talking about the year that we are in or the year that we have just come through. So I indicate that now across departments, since we are not just dwelling on K to S at this point--at least in her questioning--we have had management improvement opportunities this past year for project management, for information technology renewal, including retraining on computer skills. We have had several hundred retrained. I am not sure I am being heard. I guess it does not matter. I am not sure. Did the member hear my answer so far? [interjection] Okay.

So I will conclude then that information technology renewal involved retraining in computer skills, and we had some several hundred that were retrained through Human Resources in the department. We also had business planning take place, so that Human Resources does do some training and they organize training sessions, et cetera, but we also know that there is an expectation placed upon the branch itself. We believe that there is a responsibility in the unit with branch managers, in most instances, to set goals, provide plans and opportunities for improvement, upgrade, the acquisition of new skills, those kinds of things.

In Apprenticeship, any specific actions such as professional development, professional upgrade, we can delve into them when we get to that section under 16.5(f). It is difficult in this setting to be jumping from one line to another. If the questions are simply on layoff--who has been hired, who has been let go--then it is appropriate with these staff. But when the member starts asking about training and management, and what is happening in Apprenticeship, then she is completely off line and the answers then, we do not have the proper staff here for them.

If she wants to know what the branch managers have done in terms of setting goals, providing plans, opportunities for improvement, upgrading and acquisition of new skills, et cetera, then perhaps, she could wait till those people are here and we could answer it properly, because it is post-secondary and the Human Resources people do not have all of that information. I have indicated, just to indicate to her, that they do training or assisting in Human Resources. They do project management, technology renewal, et cetera, in Human Resources, and they place people, not just for the skills they have but also for the aptitudes that they show and that might require some training once they are into their new skills. That could be asked under 16.5(f).

We have numerous branch-level workshops, as well, Mr. Chairman, since we believe that unit managers have responsibility for that. The human resource unit has strategic human resource planning, has financial and administration workshops on accounting and financial reporting, et cetera, and so, perhaps she is not generally aware of what Human Resources does and that is why her questions have been off target a little bit.

If she wants to know in terms of the people--[interjection] Yes. If you want to know the number of people who have been, as you say, hired and fired, I can indicate--now you have not asked for this year, yet, but I am presuming you would like to know that, as well--and the '97-98 year, we notify people according to civil service instructions that their job may be impacted. It is not necessarily a firing. I know it is a more dramatic word to use. It has more emotional impact and it has a bigger hit if reporters are listening to say, fired, but it is not necessarily a word that is appropriate when you notify a person that their job may be impacted because, as I have indicated in showing last year's figures--I do not know if the member can hear me properly when she is busy doing other things, but perhaps she can--but, as I indicated last year, those people who were notified were all redeployed or placed in other positions.

So this year we have nine people who have been notified: four have already been placed; one has retired; and four are in the process of being placed in new positions. So that is for this year, and Mr. Gillespie does that very well in terms of a personal interest in the people whose jobs are affected in some way or another because of changes in mandate or direction or circumstances that government faces.

Training sessions, we have had--and this is through Human Resource--206 participants in the e-mail Internet training, 177 participants in the Internet training, 92 in the advanced Internet, and 475 participants as a total in those three sessions. We get very positive comments about the training. Just even having the opportunity, people indicate they are grateful for that. The pace and difficulty do not always fit for people due to the wide variation in previous experience with computers. Some people come in, and they have already got a great experience or have had a lot of time on computers; others have had very little. Our instructor gets a lot of good comments too, which is always nice, and I would like that to be known.

Some sessions had difficulties with the equipment, and, in some cases, the computers were not the latest and up-to-date models. So, while they were all right for training, they were not as current as they could be. We would like that to change, but all of these things cost. There is also a clear recognition that training is not enough. They also need access to computers or the Internet to practise on them, because they need the practice time as well, and others need more opportunity to apply those skills in their new positions, on-the-job use of the technology.

We have an Aboriginal Management Development Project that is done through the Human Resource Services Branch, and this, again, is part of the answer to the question: just what does Human Resource do? As I say, they do not do the onsite training or the day-to-day setting of goals and so on, but they do have some training that is applied that will help advance skill sense.

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The Aboriginal Management Development Project, we participate in that very enthusiastically. It was announced by the honourable Mr. Toews on September 25 of 1996, and that was done at the 1996 Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs conference on employment equity. It is a two-year project which selects and trains an intake of aboriginal employees in order to allow them to compete effectively for management positions within the civil service. The department nominated two candidates for this program with a view to having people selected then for the service. Clayton Sandy was a person selected for the program, and he is currently involved in a rigorous management training program. Well, he is now with the Department of Education as a very highly respected staffperson and, indeed, highly respected--I received many positive comments back about that particular gentleman.

So we have a client population of many thousands of persons of aboriginal background, and we are committed to developing management skills in their current aboriginal employees, thereby providing them with career development and promotional opportunities. To facilitate this, the Native Education branch and Human Resource Branch are forming a partnership to expand that program into a department-based initiative.

We, in talking about the consolidation of Apprenticeship and Workforce 2000, indicate to the member that that consolidation did indeed take place last year, which resulted in the downsizing of staff, but we eliminate, through that, program overlap. We refocus the available resources of each program to support workplace skills training in Manitoba, and it enables us to better focus our resources for high-priority workplace skills training. So we indicate that we build upon existing partnerships.

We will create new ones to continue the revitalization of provincial apprenticeship training, and the structure of that is not yet known. I will just emphasize that again. It is time No. 5 of saying it; I do not wish to have to say it a sixth time. The final structure of how the apprenticeship will be delivered and the types of people, the current staff, perhaps new people, we do not yet at this point know, because we are only now beginning to examine the apprenticeship task force and we are very pleased with the people that we have in apprenticeship now. They will be instrumental in helping us decipher the recommendations of the report, but it is not possible for me--last time saying it, I hope--to predict how that outcome will be decided until it has been investigated and decided. We are in the process of doing that now. I hope that is clear and can be summarized correctly by the member opposite.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, my specific question dealt with management across the department. I had moved from apprenticeship, as I indicated to the minister, and I have a number of notes here on various kinds of training sessions that are offered by Human Resource within the department.

I was interested in the Aboriginal Management Development Project. The minister said that two people had been selected by the department, but I think she only gave the name of the one. I wonder if she could tell us who the other person was and whether that project continues across departmental levels for the future. She mentioned extending it to a departmental-based initiative, but I did not get the sense from that that it continued necessarily as a government priority across departments.

Mrs. McIntosh: I may not be taking these in the exact order in which they were asked, but the Aboriginal Management Development Project was a Civil Service Commission initiative at which Department of Education and Training participates. Clayton Sandy was selected jointly by the Civil Service Commission and the department. Two people were nominated. This other person was unsuccessful. Clayton Sandy was successful in being selected for the program. I do know the name of the other individual, and if the member wishes I guess it could be provided, although as an unsuccessful candidate, it may be embarrassing for her to have her name forced to be revealed in a public setting. But there were two people nominated; one was selected, the other was not. If the member really requires it, I could provide the other name. I would prefer to allow that individual her privacy. That person can still participate in the other initiatives that are going on.

We have the three kinds of initiatives. There is the government-wide initiative, the cross-departmental initiatives and the unit-level training. I have already provided the answer to the cross-departmental one or the one that the department is involved in in terms of human resources and the 475 participants in the electronic training sessions, and the Aboriginal Management Development Project is a sample of one the Department of Education is involved in in this government-wide initiative, like, right across. The unit- or branch-level training, we would have cash flow management, that type of training for the particular unit. The business planning project management, those are things that were done in the department on a department-wide training initiative.

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Those are the kinds and types of items that we provide for the people who work in a unit, in the department or in conjunction with other departments or government-wide. So I say we give credit to the Civil Service Commission as well for its leadership in some of these, particularly the aboriginal initiatives, et cetera, where they have had some good initiatives that have been followed through by departmental staff with enthusiasm and very good co-operative ventures. It gives an indication of the types of items that we look at.

Mr. Chairperson: Shall the item pass? Pass.

16.1.(d) Human Resource Services (2) Other Expenditures $69,400--pass.

16.1.(e) Financial and Administrative Services (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits $881,300. Shall we wait for the staff to change over?

Mr. Sale: Unfortunately, this has become kind of an annual exercise. This is the third set of Estimates in which I have raised questions about information system issues. I want to again put on the record just a bit of the history as I understand it, that in the mid-1980s the information system ceased operating effectively for a number of reasons, some of them to do with previous government and some of them to do with the then current government.

The Minister of Education, Honourable Roland Penner, made, I believe, a wise decision to acquire an off-the-shelf system to be customized to Manitoba's needs. That system was subsequently installed in somewhat over 200 schools and is in widespread use in North America, and the minister knows, I think, and certainly her staff know that there are a number of student record systems, highly customizable, cheap, debugged, operating on microcomputers, not requiring mainframe, or at least if they require much in the way of mainframe, it is very insignificant. For example, the whole city of London, I believe, operates on a microcomputer system, and that is a school population that is roughly half of our total provincial population.

So I first wanted to ask the minister, of course, a question of fact and I hope she can answer it, although she may have to ask her staff to get the information. How much money has been spent between 1988-89, when the Trevlac system was acquired--for a total cost, I believe, in the order of $220,000--as a provincial site licence, from that time forward specifically for a student information system. Mr. Chairperson, I am not asking her to include the costs of the Hewlett Packard minicomputer system, the hardware, which I have some memory of, roughly a million dollars. I am asking about the development of the student information system itself and what has been spent to date from 1988-89, in round numbers, to the current time. I believe there is some $700,000 budgeted for it this year. It was a million last year.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, we are actually in 16.1(e) which is Financial and Administrative Services, and this particular section is 16.4(c), but we have the manager here. He was up in the balcony, so he has come down, and I will introduce, if I may--I do not think I introduced Mr. Jim Glen and Mr. Greg Baylis. Mr. Baylis is the manager for EIS at MIS.

You do not want the hardware or software costs, so I have to indicate that the other costs since that time have been internal, like staff costs and so on, and the costs outside of that would be the hardware. So we do not have any site licences, that type of thing. We have a number of things that have been done by the staff in consultation with the field, but they have not involved beyond the staff's regular salary. It is considered part of their assigned duties. There will be costs if we include the hardware, but the rest--and I can provide some samples, if the member would be interested, in terms of tabling some of the work that has been done in consultation with the field.

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I think I have four copies of this. I could, for example, table this which gives--it is an EIS update. I do not know if the member gets these. This is Volume 2, No. 1 for April of this year and then I have the EIS collection, data collection system, four of these that might be helpful. There are numerous magazine articles and that type of thing. [interjection] All right. I can show you just in terms of the type of work that is being done, but it is part of the ongoing work of the department, and therefore not considered an extra cost. For example, we had an EIS workshop, and the work covered in that, we had information on students, like the September 30 reports for the Schools' Finance Branch. We had an overview of the September 30 data collection reporting requirements for September 30 of 1997, reporting deadlines, future data collection. We had course code requirements in the School Programs division, changes to course code reporting and subject table handbook.

We had professional certification of student records and high school marks. Under that would be the processing marks and list of contacts, the EIS collection, the Management Information Services branch, providing the information on hardware and software requirements, technical aspects of electronic data transfer, vendor commitments and responsibilities, assignment and distribution of the MET numbers, demonstration of software, role of consultants.

We had a third piece on teacher information, reporting of teacher information and education, administrative Services branch, changes to reporting requirements, PSP forms, monthly staff updates and application forms, processing of teacher information, lists of contacts, et cetera, the EIS collection, Management Information Services branch involved in explanation of the process, demonstration of software in this particular workshop. So they have workshops dealing with those kinds of things, but nothing that would result in a bill or a cost.

Just looking down this one sheet here, I do not see anything that I could add to that right now. So the member may wish to ask additional information. I will try to provide it.

(Mr. Mervin Tweed, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)

Mr. Sale: To clarify then, Mr. Chairperson, the Estimates data for the last number of years have included expenditures. The minister is saying those are all hardware or related software expenditures, they were not for external contracts or other services. What then is the approximate total? I am not asking for absolute accuracy. What is the approximate total that has been spent on hardware and related software for the EIS project?

For clarification, Mr. Chairperson, I think that the staff and minister understood, I am asking for the cumulative total to date, approximate.

Mrs. McIntosh: I have the figures and some information as to what is happening with those figures. The total figure over the years, over the last three years, way back, $1.6 million is the amount that has been spent, and that is on the Hewlett-Packard departmental microcomputer database software. We also have about $400,000 in other software over the years and we have six SYs or staff years for the past four years, which would be around $900,000.

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But I have to indicate that, in terms of what we are doing with the money, we have got the hardware, we have got the software, and we are right at the moment ready to match this data collected, and I will talk about that just for a few moments. We are ready to match the data collected so far with financial data. We have a committee called the education indicators committee; John Carlyle is chairing that committee. We are now at the point where we can start deriving indicators from that particular committee. We also have the assistant superintendent from Winnipeg School Division No. 1, Doug Edmond, who chairs the EIS committee.

Well, there is a comment made, I would just like to pause and read from. It is in the MASBO business magazine, 1997, and they are talking about what we are doing here. Howard Griffith--there is a quote--educational technology consultant for the division and teacher at Virden Collegiate, said: Because the MSR is only a database collection tool for student information, Virden Collegiate maintained its Trevlac program, which also includes timetabling and attendance-keeping functions--and I know the member is familiar with this--to file student enrollment reports. Trevlac had modified their program, the School Administrator, to create exporting formats that conform to the Manitoba guidelines. It was the matter of getting an exporting facility that allowed us to take the existing data fields in the Trevlac program into a form that the MSR could read, said Griffith. Our biggest frustration was the program was new, et cetera, et cetera, but overall things went relatively smoothly.

Benefits of the MSR are many, said Didlock [phonetic], another individual. Clear, reliable student information is readily available from the master file. Data inputting is not duplicated. There is a definite reduction of paper reporting. Reporting and data collection are consistent. The provincial student number, MET number, ensures that student information is not duplicated if a student relocates. The records' validation utility, which is part of the MSR, verifies data and corrects errors before the information goes to the department, eliminating time spent on discovering and correcting errors and so on.

It is very, very complimentary about the work that is being done, and it is--this is my only copy, but, if you are interested, it is in the MASBO magazine, 1997.

Maybe I should just indicate, first of all, that the EIS is a multiyear project. It began in 1993, designed to provide an integrated provincial database of education-related information.

I know the member may be familiar with some of what I am about to tell her, but I think there are some other things in here that have not been put forward, at least in the Estimates I was in last year.

We know the benefits of EIS to be the reduction in the number of requests for information from schools and divisions, et cetera; the ability to more accurately identify student results and trends and track student flows and access the education system by evaluating inputs processes, outputs; getting data on student development and progress, et cetera, also to increase and validate information.

Well, to date, EIS has provided a database of school division and subject information. It has been providing that. It has been providing an advanced capacity for processing provincial exams, the ability to collect and report on high school marks.

September of last year we had 104,000 students electronically enrolled. That participation became mandatory in September '97. So each of the students that has been electronically enrolled, which is 104,000 of them, has been assigned a provincial student number, and that number is following the student.

We have this up and running now. By the end of this '97-98 academic year, we will have all of the K to Senior 4 students on the provincial database, and are able now to associate provincial exam, high school marks information with individual students using their student number.

We are also in the process of implementing maintaining certification workload information on that for the province's teachers, the active teachers. This system is designed for a lot more than just one function, and that is being implemented now and should be finished within about a two-year period, 24-month period. We are putting together an enhanced student enrollment process to gather information about French language programs and senior years marks, and school divisions have been provided or they are being provided with software, the EIS collection. Either they have got it or they are in the process. That is this particular brochure and--[interjection] Yes, we are having problems with private vendors taking that information, and we are going to have to licence it to keep it from being stolen, but it allows more comprehensive validation of data at the local level.

So we have got a method of entering student and teacher data required by the department. We can manually enter into EIS collection or import it for school or school division software applications. Once the information is in the EIS collection, staff can modify, check and report. They can also export to other formats. So you have got the manual data entry, the administrative software, the other applications, all in the school EIS collection.

Similarly, in the school EIS collection you can have student enrollment, student marks, teacher and professional personnel activities gathered into the EIS collection at the school level. Each type of information will have a separate file, it has got a separate data file, and that is sent from the school to the division office. So again, the school EIS collection, student enrollment, the teacher and professional development activity going straight through into the division head office or board office or anywhere, that is set up for an internal one.

The data files received from the schools are entered into the EIS collection in the school division offices, in the board offices, and the school information is consolidated into one division file for student marks, student enrollment, teacher activity, et cetera. So again, then, you have the division EIS collection, spinning off for school-student enrollment, school-student marks, schools-teacher training or teacher professional development activity, and then down again you can siphon off the other activities, the division student marks, et cetera, and it can all come in through it.

So that is being done now, and it is a fair bit of work that has actually been done. It has not been idle in the length of time that people have been working on it, and I have given you the software costs as well in giving you the total cost. That is just an overview. I hope that brings you up to date. I can try to answer more if it does not.

Mr. Sale: I thank the minister for that summary, and it does bring me up to date that there have been some areas of what sounds like significant progress. I hope--I do not want to make any statement that makes the minister feel like I am being critical, but if she could answer questions more quickly, we could stay with the issue more easily, I think, rather than broad answers because, at this point, I am really trying to just discover some specifics.

Now, the last information was very helpful, so I am not being critical of that, but I have some very specific questions which I hope we could get just quite specific, factual answers to and get through that.

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The first one is the issue of--well, let me put it in the context of this green document. We recommend that EIS collection be used to the school office level to collect and forward data to the division office even if the school is using the school administration software package. One of the principles of data system development has always been that if the end user is supportive of the system and can get some value out of the system, they are much more likely to put accurate data in and to actually use the system the way it is intended, because there is a benefit for them at the end of the day.

It is something we tried to do in acquiring the softer approach that we took in the '80s, to provide immediate benefit to the school and be able then to extract from the school's system the data the department needed.

Reading this cold, the implication is that we are back to duplication, that schools are required or, at least, strongly encouraged to take a data file probably on a diskette format, fill that in at the school level, and send it in to the division electronically or manually, however it is done--which really says to me, at least if I were school administrator, why am I bothering to run a Trevlac system and do all the work to keep that up to date if you are going to want me to fill in another data file for EIS purposes? Am I understanding this correctly that the strong recommendation is we have two systems here, please use ours to get the data we want and do whatever you want to do with your data?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I have a chart that I would like to table, I think, might help answer the question for the member, and I will try to keep it brief. It is sort of a fine art that I do not always get down well in terms of--but if I answer really briefly, then maybe I will not give enough details. If I give too much details, I will have talked too long, and I am never quite right on the mark.

I have a chart that I think might help, if I could table it, and just indicate that school divisions will have, you know, many, many different systems. It could be Columbia; it could be Trevlac; it could be something else. They have 12 or 13 different ones that they have chosen because it really, really suit their needs. We do not wish to impose any one system on them. What we have got though--I am not a techie, so I am not easily conversant with some of these technological factors, but I do understand that these are not in conflict, that they are complementary. They are not duplicating; they are complementary. If you have the chart you can maybe take a look. I do not know if that chart itself is helpful to you, but there are two sets of software, yes, but they do different things. Our software is in essence an edit of what they enter, so it rolls it up. It saves, I understand from staff, thousands of phone calls a year to double check on things, and that is about the briefest explanation I can give, but I am assured that it is a complementary item as opposed to a duplicating one.

Mr. Sale: I will try to be as clear as I can. When the EIS collection software is sent to a school division and then presumably sent to schools, it may be in electronic format. I presume that is the idea that it will be a diskette that will produce a number of fields in which data is to be entered. The possibility exists, I think, in the Virden example that the minister read from MASBO that if you have conversion software that is appropriate, or extraction software that is appropriate, you can extract some or all of the required data and transfer it to the EIS fields appropriately. Presumably the fields are marked in some form that makes this possible, and I am not a techie either, but I think I am understanding that there are separate data entry requirements.

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If I were running the Trevlac system at my school or Columbia or whatever other there are, I would still have to enter data from that system or other data into the EIS system. The staff are shaking their heads, so that is maybe an easy no, and if that is a no, then could we explain the statement that is in the green sheet: Use the EIS collection to collect and forward data even if the school is using the school admin software package. That is what I am not understanding.

Mrs. McIntosh: Maybe the simplest way to put it--it is the way that I can understand. I do not know if it is ours reads theirs. As I say, it is edit if our software will read theirs directly and verifies it. So they do not have to re-enter it. It is there. Our stuff will automatically read it directly, verify its accuracy, make sure it is not a duplication.

In terms of the quote that you have got there, they can enter it in whatever form they wish, and all they are asking then is that they run that data through our collection as well. So we do not have to verify it at our end then. It is essentially like--this is not a very good analogy, but in my mind, it is not unlike you type a letter on your word processor and you run a copy off your printer for yourself, and then you run a copy off another printer in another office for somebody else. You have done a double function, but you have not had to re-enter.

I do not know if that is a particularly valid analogy. You are not duplicating the work for you, but you are providing the information to another recipient.

Mr. Sale: I wonder if the minister would be agreeable to her staff providing a briefing section on the system to whomever among our staff and caucus might be interested, so that we could see in a hands-on sense how this system works and what its capabilities are. That might shorten this process and bring us all up to speed on the progress that has been achieved.

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, Mr. Chairman, we would be pleased to do that. We have a workshop prepared that I think might be very helpful that we gave in the schools, and some of the feedback from that is: most informative seminar, great; we have a support team from department to schools; the presenters are well informed in their areas; I appreciated the ease with which you switch to each category; it helps us to talk or listen to each level of data needed, et cetera; it seems like a nice, simple program to use; can barely wait.

Those kinds of comments make me feel good, especially when I see the nice, simple part, because anything electronic, to me, that is just so critical. But there is a lot of good feedback from this seminar, and we can probably repeat it, and we would be pleased to do that for all MLAs.

We will set it up and notify the members of the Assembly, hopefully at a time that is easy for people, and that would be good for all of us, I think. I thank the member for the suggestion.

Mr. Sale: I think I would then just like to ask a couple of questions about the actual student information number. Is the number, first of all, generated by the EIS system, or is it generatable at the school level on enrollment?

Mrs. McIntosh: Very simply, the student registers, we receive the name, we assign a number, and the number goes back to the division as that student's number. There are a whole series of checks that are gone through to make sure that it is not a number that is already in use or that the student does not have another number, et cetera, but basically, we assign the number and send it to the field.

Mr. Sale: Is that number accessible to the student? Does it show up on student report cards or whatever else? In other words, it is a number that follows the student through their career in Manitoba schools presumably from nursery, if they enroll at nursery, and I guess that is a second question, but is it assigned at first enrollment, first contact of that child with the Manitoba school system? Secondly, is it a number that the child or parents or others would see and have access to, or is it a hidden identifier?

Mrs. McIntosh: The number is given to the student at their earliest entrance into the school, so if they start in kindergarten that is when they would get it, or whenever it is they do come in. That is the same number that then stays with them. We do not force it to be revealed; each division can decide. We do not compel it to be unknown to parents and students, so parents and students can know the number. That is perfectly all right, but it is up to schools and divisions and parents together to decide.

An Honourable Member: It is administrative.

Mrs. McIntosh: Yes, it is an administrative number. Students do not have to use it, for example, when they come to register. At university maybe you have to use a number or something to register, but this number is not used in that way.

Mr. Sale: That was my question: Was whether the number was used for administrative purposes in terms of registering or presenting at another school for enrollment or whatever, whether this became something like an MHSC number that was essentially a billing number in effect? So the minister is saying, no, it is not used for that purpose.

Is the EIS system an on-line system or is it essentially a batch system?

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Mrs. McIntosh: I sometimes feel when I start listening to these people talk that I am listening to a different language because there are so many words invented in our language as a result of technology. [interjection] Well, no, it is wonderful to hear, but, to me, it is still a little bit like learning a foreign language. Simply put, and this part I do understand, the school division sends it to us in batch; we then put it on-line. It is an on-line system. For us it is an on-line system, so we will put it into on-line when we get it from the divisions. They cannot access it from the division.

Mr. Sale: That was my concern, the question of whether the system was accessible from schools because obviously then there are all the questions about encryption and safeguarding data lines, et cetera, and it becomes a very different kind of system.

In the EIS system, is there any intention to collect data which might be more personal than marks are, such as disciplinary cautions or codes? For example, we have unfortunately children in our system that commit weapons offences. We have violent children in our system. I am not raising these to raise fears, but I am asking really are these sorts of data intended to be collected for EIS purposes, or is it purely administrative marks and student identifier system?

(Mr. Chairperson in the Chair)

Mrs. McIntosh: It is not our intention to be adding personal information into the database. Right now, we do not have any indication that we are planning to do anything more than the academic things that pertain to the learning experience in progress in learning, yes, demographic details, those kinds of things; like, how many new Canadians, for example, who have English as a second language. We do not wish to identify that with names and the numbers, but rather those would be survey-type information that could be used for the collection of data.

We had a question, for example, the other day in terms of how many students have been expelled from public versus private schools, that kind of question which we do not collect in terms of John Brown and Mary Smith. We are conscious of the privacy of people as you are, too, I know. We might though someday have wish to put in information on citizenship, where we take a look at students' learnings in terms of citizenship, which might then include how many students have been expelled.

I am just picking up on the concept that you have mentioned--how it might appear someday perhaps, how many students have been expelled or suspended because they did not understand or respect the authority's rules and regulations in a school, which would have an indication of citizenship applications. We would not want to have those associated with names and numbers again. Those would be survey instruments. They are the kind of data that might be useful for us to have, but it is not our intention to attach that to individuals. We would rather have it generic, if we have that kind of stuff down the road.

Mr. Sale: I have found this helpful, the briefing, and I look forward to the session. I just say the minister may want to make it available to everybody, but if she wanted simply to let us know about a session that was going on that we might be able to attend at a convenient time, that is also an option, and I appreciate the opportunity.

I have just one last question. One of the hopes that we had in the '80s was that--I am sorry, two questions--divisions would begin to be able to quickly transfer school records electronically because of the extreme mobility, particularly in inner city schools, and between urban and rural areas where kids can sometimes go through four schools a year and their records never do catch up to them.

It sounds to me like the EIS will provide only a very bare bones kind of information for them in terms of the kind of information that might be helpful to a school division from a programming perspective, because initially you are going to provide them with age, grade, marks, basic sociodemographic information but pretty basic, I suspect. I do not know if you will be indicating single-parent status for example in the initial go-round. So it sounds to me like we still have not cracked the problem of quickly getting records from school A to school B in electronic format which we initially had hoped would be able to be accomplished. It sounds like that is still down the road.

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Mrs. McIntosh: It may not be, at the present time, that every school can forward information immediately to another school. Sometimes the students do not show up unfortunately in another school for a while, and there will be a gap there where they suddenly are gone from one school--the member knows the kinds of circumstances I am discussing. But once arriving in the new school, the one thing that they can do is the school can contact the department--if they have the student's name, they can phone us. We can immediately, the same day, electronically have all the information go over to them. We can tell them where they came from. The number of times they have been--what schools they have been to and who to contact. We can look in our own electronic records to see that and say, your student came from Clifton or whatever and before that he was at school X and here are the contact names, et cetera. It will be wonderful when the day comes that they will be able to know, if the student says where he is from--just to be able to go punch a number to that school and get it.

We have a steering committee and a stakeholder committee in terms of EIS. We have some very--Doug Edmond, as I mentioned before, is superintendent from Winnipeg 1 who chairs the EIS steering committee membership. He is from MAST. We also have Marinus Vanosh, Bruce Cairns, Tom Alrigg [phonetic], et cetera, people from various other groups on that.

Then we have a stakeholder committee membership as well. These are the types of topics, the question the member asked, that we seek advice from. The stakeholder committee has secretary treasurers, Wayne Shimizu from Seven Oaks. It has Ron Bannister, Ian MacIntyre. These people are teachers. So we have got a whole list of very capable names there to sort of guide us. Those are the types of questions and answers that they try to prioritize for direction.

Mr. Sale: This is the last question. There was a mountain of records, and everybody will know that I am referring to the mountain of old records that wound up just waiting for something. Has there been a decision reached about whether anything will be done with those or whether they will simply be written off to history at this point? There were as many, I think, as 10 years of unentered various format records from high schools stored at the department in a whole lot of formats, paper, tape, old diskettes, microfilm, et cetera. Has there been a decision about that?

Mrs. McIntosh: We have student marks, the member is correct, stored for about 10 years back, about a 10-year collection in the student records in the Russell office. We have been trying to knock them off, so to speak, in about two-year batches at a time. We figure it will take about five years doing it that way. We are using STEP students, et cetera, to transmit that from the paper because we do not want to leave them stored in boxes forever, and they have been there--as the member knows, he is more familiar with it than I am. So if we take it a two-year amount and a swat and get rid of it, and we do that every year for five years, we should have it gone.

An Honourable Member: What does get rid of it mean? What are you doing with it?

Mrs. McIntosh: I mean, to get it put into electronic form, so that it is stored the same way our other material is. That will not take into account all the old student records that are in the little museum in Cartwright, Manitoba, that they keep at their little old desks and they are wonderful to see, but official records. I am just thinking those paper ones are wonderful to peruse but very impractical to store and are not a safe way to store them either.

Mr. Sale: Just to clarify then, they are being entered into the IS system on a catch-up basis over however many years it takes to do that, and that is the final decision that has been made in that regard.

Mrs. McIntosh: Starting with the newest and working backwards and we expect around five years using STEP students and that type of personnel to do the work.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, we wanted to move away from Schools Information System, EIS, and to deal with the Auditor's Report on the Education department. I do not know if the minister needs to add staff or anything at this stage.

Mrs. McIntosh: We do not have the Auditor's Report here, but the staff members who are here are quite familiar with it, so I think we will be able to answer the member's questions.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, the Auditor took a fairly thorough look at a number of sections of the department in the Provincial Auditor's Report for 1995-96, Volume 1, and the department had the opportunity to respond to some of those. I wanted to discuss with the minister some of the findings and recommendations. In a sense, it really exists in note form, I think, and it is very much the Auditor's Report with some small responses from the department, and I wondered if the department's responses were more extensive than this.

The Auditor has, I think, some mixed findings about the department. One of the areas which he praises the department for is for improving its annual reporting, for becoming much speedier in its production of its annual report, and I certainly concur in that. But there are four other areas that the Auditor had some concerns about, some of which the department answers, some of which they, perhaps, have only very short answers. The first of these is legislation, the second is program responsibilities, the third one she picked up on was the nature of accountability information to be reported, and the frequency and timing of accountability reports. This is from page 68 of the report.

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Under legislation, the Auditor had a series of expectations and his criticisms of the department were based upon his assumption--and I am using the term "his" generically. It may well have been the previous Auditor who did this, so it is a generic term that I am using--that The Education Administration Act, The Public Schools Act and The Public Schools Finance Board Act do not clearly set out the principle and elements of a public schools accountability framework. He made some recommendations that the department clearly set out the principle and elements of public schools accountability. The department responded that, in Bill 33 and Bill 47 and in Advisory Councils for School Leadership, it was doing that, had done that. What I did not understand from the department's response was whether the department believed that this was all that was required. There is not a sense in the Auditor's Report--and I recognize it is the Auditor's Report--that the department has plans to expand upon this, that it recognizes that Bill 33 and Bill 47 left gaps, that there is more to meet the Auditor's requirement.

So I am looking, first of all, for some discussion on that from the department in terms of future plans of this section of the department, and we are looking at Administration and Finance and a section of the department whose responsibility it is to comply with central government policies and regulations. So the question relates to the area of legislation and the principles and elements of a public school's accountability framework. Does the department, does the minister believe that the response that is given on page 69 of the Auditor's Report, that we have tabled Bill 33, we have tabled Bill 47, et cetera, is sufficient to meet the concerns of the Auditor?

Mrs. McIntosh: The Provincial Auditor, we think, has done a very good thing in getting into an effectiveness audit, and we really like the direction the Auditor has taken. Ours is the first department, I believe, that the Auditor has begun to work with this particular thrust to look at full effectiveness, and we welcome it and hope to be a leader for other departments as this thrust continues through government.

Bill 33 gives the minister the power to ask for information, the full extent of information required for any piece of accountability. What we do not have yet in place, and it is a difficult thing to put in place in terms of time and thinking, is the framework within which we are going to demand accountability or require accountability from the field. So the power is now there in legislation to request the information. The decisions are needed to be made now as to what is the correct information to request in order to really be effective and accountable. So that, I think, answers both parts of the question. The Provincial Auditor has taken this new direction of effectiveness audit. We like it. We hope to be the role model for other government departments with this, and we do have the power to ask for what we need, but as yet we are still determining what is the correct information to request to be fully accountable. We need to decide the nature of the accountability, how the reporting should be done, and how frequent should the reports be, et cetera. Those are all questions that we are having to explore to go to the next step.

Ms. Friesen: Under this same heading, the Auditor had three concerns. One was the key function of defining--and I am quoting from page 70 here--developing and mandating implementation of the provincial curriculum is not clearly set out in legislation. No. 2 was, quoting from the report of the panel on education legislation reform, the Auditor noted that the panel noted that there is confusion as to whether the minister alone has the authority to develop and improve curricula or whether a school board also has these powers. And thirdly, the issue of the lack of a uniform provincial curriculum within public schools has hampered the department's ability to conduct system-wide comparisons and evaluations of the public school system.

I would like to ask the department at this stage, because it is not addressed--those three issues are not specifically addressed in the response, because the response only refers, and this is obviously in chronological terms, to Bills 33 and 47. The department has two more bills this time and, I wonder, again, does the department believe that the powers that it would have, if those bills were passed, and under Bills 33 and 47, whether again those are sufficient to meet the concerns of the Auditor?

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Mrs. McIntosh: We believe the legislation is clear and that, yes, indeed that curriculum can be mandated even to things such as school-initiated curriculum, et cetera, which ultimately will come to the minister for approval which then can be mandated for use by other schools as well. So we believe the legislation does provide that authority.

Ms. Friesen: The Auditor recommends quite clearly that the department communicate in a separate policy document the revised roles, responsibilities and interrelationships of each stakeholder. I see that the department has got the Auditor's Report now. This is on page 70. I wondered if the department intended to follow this recommendation and, if the department does follow it, when we could see that document.

Mrs. McIntosh: Since the Auditor's Report, the one that we are talking about, Bills 33 and 47 have passed. They have sections in them that impact upon comments and suggestions made by the Auditor. So both of those bills have passed which give the minister certain authorities. What we do not have--and we do not believe it requires a legislative change--is the administration framework within which to do those, to put a framework together whereby we can get a thorough public accountability framework. Out of that, we can see things such as school plans, et cetera, accountability processes such as those.

The Auditor's Report predates the passage of Bills 33 and 47. We do not think at this point we require additional legislation beyond that, but we do have additional things we need to do to flesh that out and have those accountability measures there.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, as I read page 70, in the recommendation at the bottom of that, I think my understanding of what the Auditor was getting at was a publicly comprehensible document that might be--he does not say it. He does not talk about parents here, but he does say, communicate in a separate policy document the revised roles, responsibilities and inter-relationships of each stakeholder.

So my sense of that recommendation was not that it was an either/or situation with legislation, but it was in addition, that it lay out everything that had happened. That was why I was asking could we expect that from the department, and if so, when.

Mrs. McIntosh: The member is referring, I believe, at the bottom of page 70, to some directions from the Auditor which we take very seriously, that we like. We approve of them. We have actually done most of them or are in the process of completing others. Just to clarify, the Auditor says: We recommend that the department more clearly define in legislation, regulations and policies, responsibilities and reporting relationships of key stakeholders in the public schools accountability framework.

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We have more clearly, since the Auditor wrote this, defined in legislation through Bills 33 and 47 and in the regulations attached to those, which have been done and passed by various stakeholder bodies for comment and input and possible revision; we have developed or are in the process of developing policies. I indicate, for an example, we are currently developing a policy document on assessment of students. We send things such as this--if the deputy would be good enough to pass me this--out to the field, what is known in certain circles as the endless paper blizzard from the department.

However, we are reporting regularly on student progress and achievement and those go out in the form of documents to the field, as the Auditor has indicated we should be doing, and while there have been numerous reports in terms of the quantity, we have been really pleased as we go on. More and more, we are hearing positive comments about the quality and the content of those reports in terms of their clarification for the field. We talked about the handbook the other day for differentiated instruction, and we are getting more and more positive responses as we get more and more skilled in sending out reports.

We will soon have a document, a policy on assessment of students ready to go out, and it fits in under the--we recommend in separate policy documents, revised roles, responsibilities, interrelationships of each stakeholder. In terms of the regulations attached to a lot of the new legislation, the regulations in and of themselves are sometimes reflective of a policy, practice or a method, a code of behaviour or actions to be taken that fall, I think, very clearly in with the requests made by the Auditor, and most of those we have been doing in conjunction with various and sundry stakeholders.

So we may not have a big separate policy book that has everything in it, but we do have our basic action plan which is one I know the member is familiar with, the Renewing Education: New Directions document, and inside there we have duties of schools boards. This was part of an action plan that we sent out to the field, and it indicates the things that we need school boards do. So it is clear, as the Auditor recommends, in terms of accountability that they have to implement provincial curriculum as directed by the minister. That is now in legislation and in the process of happening. The school boards have to administer and manage the affairs of the school division, set divisional budget, special budget levy, provide advance release of the draft budget to the public and receive input, and that is now in legislation. These were all plans a couple of years ago when my predecessor was minister and they are now actually things that are happening.

School divisions this year for the first time had to have public consultations on their budget, something that in 1990--what was it, 4, 5, 6?--that Mr. Manness indicated the beginning of 1995. These were his plans; they are now done. The minister now, as part of the school division duty, can receive and report to the minister on any educational matter, including school plans, that the minister feels is essential information for the minister to have, requires principals upon request by parents to start a process for Advisory Councils for School Leadership. These are all accountability things that we believe fit under this section on page 70. Some are very specific. I will not go through them all, but some are very specific in terms of accountability: Provide pertinent and meaningful information about the school division as required by the Advisory Councils for School Leadership to meet their mandate in serving schools. The minister can say I want information and receive it, the parents can say I want information and receive it. So the accountability goes in both directions from the local school authorities.

But if you look on pages 20 and 21 in Renewing Education: New Directions, you will see all the plans that we had down in terms of prescribing and mandating assessment and evaluation, et cetera, that were plans at the end of 1994, beginning of 1995, that have, since this Auditor's Report has been written, now been more clearly defined in legislation, regulations and policies, the responsibilities, the reporting relationships of the key stakeholders in the public schools accountability framework, and the Auditor knew at the time of the writing of the Auditor's Report the contents of our plans.

The next phase would be to tie the outcomes that we are learning from school divisions to the dollars that are spent, which is a pretty critical tie. I will maybe stop there because the member may have more questions.

Ms. Friesen: What I was trying to do was to underline the issue of communication which I think the Auditor is addressing here as well. He is addressing in one sense the accountability framework, and the minister has talked about regulations and acts and actions plans and all of that, but I think the Auditor is concerned, beyond that, about the communication in a document that is understood, accepted by all the stakeholders. So that is really the issue I was drawing to her attention. It seems to me that that might be a very timely thing for the department to undertake.

I am wanting to go on in the Auditor's Report to look at the second item that he raises, and that is the nature--well, it is page 71, and that is the planning and performance information provided by the department to the Legislative Assembly. The Auditor has concerns about the Estimates supplement and the annual report, and on page 72, for example, he says that: We found that the acts and regulations governing the reporting requirements for public school programs do not clearly outline the requirement for the members of the Legislative Assembly to be provided with sufficient and appropriate planning and performance indication.

What he is concerned about, in particular, is that relationship that the minister was indicating she was going to address, and that is the relationship between the objectives and the activities and the results.

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I wonder if the minister would take some time to tell us how the department is actually going to address this issue of reporting to the Legislative Assembly, particularly Estimates. Public school program costs, for example, are fragmented throughout the Estimates supplement, and I am quoting again from the Auditor. He mentions also that the obstacles to the successful completion of activities were not mentioned, something which he anticipates all departments would do, and the relationship between support to schools, Schools Grants program support, et cetera, and the actual outcomes are not there in Estimates.

Now, obviously, there has not been time between the Auditor's Report and the production of this year's Estimates for the department to begin to move in that direction, but I am interested in how the department is going to comply with this, one assumes for the coming year.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the member raises a very good point because I mentioned earlier that the Auditor has taken a new approach with our department, an effectiveness audit approach which we very much like and it is a brand new field in terms of a way of assessing--and I say brand new. Actually, Alberta Education has been doing this for about a year, maybe two, in terms of the way in which it has adjusted its reporting in this area.

The Auditor is essentially advocating a business plan being revealed in our reporting. The Auditor does not use that terminology, but along the line of the discussion we had earlier with the member for Crescentwood on EIS, he is looking to have us build upon data and information which will have to ultimately take into account all of the concerns that we have about privacy of individuals, et cetera.

We have a next phase that we need to enter. The member has correctly identified it, and we will be working in conjunction with advisers in terms of the best way to approach this. I will maybe stop there for a minute.

Ms. Friesen: I do have another question, but I think it is one of the fundamental ones that the Auditor raises. There may not be time to answer at this time, but I will put it on the record and then if the department staff want to look at it.

I was interested in the minister's response because I have seen the Alberta ones, the three-year rolling business plans that they do, and it certainly was not what I had anticipated the Auditor was looking for, so I am interested that that is the department's interpretation.

On page 74, the Auditor talks about the difficulty for anybody looking at Estimates, and this of course goes beyond the Legislature. The estimated total operating revenues and expenditures for the public school program were not disclosed in the document, and he means in Estimates. Without this information, the reader is unable to obtain the complete picture of the public school program. Direct grants from the Consolidated Fund in '94-95 only represented 50 percent of annual school division revenues. Other significant sources of public school program funding are not described, such as the Provincial Education Support Levy and the special levy set by school boards on property assessments.

It goes on to say that the FRAME budget provides good information on expenditures, total budgeted revenues and expenditures of all public schools, but what you do not get from the Estimates process or from the way in which the department has historically reported Education funding. You do not, either as a member of the Legislature, as a member of the public, or as a member of the school board get a sense of the overall picture. It is a fundamental issue of Education funding, and I do not know if the minister wants to start the response to that, but I am looking for the plans of the department to respond to that particular issue.

Mr. Chairperson: I think we may want to call it six o'clock, seeing as we have only got a couple of minutes. That way the department can give the minister the time to answer this question tomorrow.

The hour now being close to six o'clock, committee rise.

Call in the Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Marcel Laurendeau): The hour now being six o'clock, this House is now adjourned and stands adjourned until 1:30 p.m. tomorrow (Wednesday). Bonsoir.