Howard Epstein on Interprovincial Labour Mobility

Excerpt from Hansard: November 7, 2006
The honourable member for Halifax Chebucto

Subject: Supplementary Education Funding

Those dollars that the municipality has to turn over to the province come out of the property tax…Those dollars are being used, in part, to fund the education system over which the municipalities have no control…They don’t set the curriculum, they don’t hire the teachers, they’re not the Department of Education, they’re not the school board - they just don’t have any power. They simply are the partial funders of that system …We know that UNSM, year in and year out, puts it on record that they don’t like it…Would that we had some commitment from the government to a phase-out of this, that would be important…There’s another problem when it comes to the funding of education at the school level in Nova Scotia. That problem is the question of the overall level of funding, even when the province receives the $200 million from the municipalities and adds in monies from the general flow of provincial revenues from other sources, we hear complaints that maybe it’s still not enough…I know there are parents everywhere in this province who are concerned about the quality of education their children receive. Quality means different things to different families, but they all seek quality for their students. If their children are particularly bright children, they want to see International Baccalaureate at the high school level, they want to see extra classes for those students, they want to see their students challenged in particular ways, they want French Immersion Programs and on it goes…If their students have some kind of learning disability or a physical disability, they want personalized attention. The parents of those children want personalized attention for those students …I think if supplementary education funding really were about finding a few extra things that really were a supplement, if we already had a really good system along the principles that I’ve outlined, maybe there might be a little room left over in some communities for adding on a little bit extra…They invented [supplementary education funding] in HRM, in the former cities of Halifax and Dartmouth and it’s now spread out since the formation of HRM. They invented it because they were concerned really about the fundamental quality of the education system. They worried about the quality of the education system, they felt what they called supplementary education money, supplementary dollars, should have to be put in place in order to give the quality of education they thought their children ought to be receiving in the first place if the system were adequately funded… [But]There is a problem with the quality and funding of our education system and parents know it. Parents who have their children in the public school system know there’s a problem there…Why do we continue to see an increase in the numbers of students who go to private schools? The parents who can afford it are all too often tempted to take their children out of the public school system and take them to where they think they’re going to get a better education…Many of us, like myself, made a policy choice to keep our children [ in the public system] all the way through the school system…

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