Legislative Assembly _

Wednesday, May 17, 1967

Honourable Gordon L. Bennett: Mr. Speaker, yesterday, in the few moments I had, I indicated that I would not speak at any length in the Budget Address, but in view of the fact that our Department has claimed 25% of the expenditures for the coming year, I feel that I should make a few remarks.

One of my regrets was that I was absent from the Legislature the evening that the Provincial Treasurer presented his Budget Address, and gave us a resume of the revenues and expenditures for the coming year. However, from what I have read and have heard it would appear that this province is in a precarious n financially. The figures that have been given indicate pretty convincingly t we are now in the area of big financing when we are responsible for the expenditures of forty to fifty million dollars. I maintain, Mr. Speaker, that when we get into this area of expenditure that it is no place for amateurs and I feel that never in the history of this province have we needed so badly a capable and conscientious custo- dian of the currency as we do at the present time. I am quite satisfied, and I feel sure that al. honourable members of the House will agree with me when I say that we have the most capable individual, most competent, in the form of the Provincial Treasurer and I hope that through his careful guidance Prince Edward Island may once again be placed on a sound financial basis.

Now, Mr. Speaker it is rather trite to say that the costs of education are ris- ing. We see it in our own budget, we see it in the budgets of other provinces, and in order that I might have the record completely correct I contacted all the other provinces of Canada to determine just how much of their total budget is spent on education, and I find Sir, figures something like this. Not surprisingly Ontario leads the list in spending 34% on education; Manitoba 33.6%: Alberta 33%: British Colum- bia 32%: Nova Scotia 82%; the Province of Saskatchewan 29.2%; New Brunswick 28.6%; Newfoundland 27.5%; Quebec 27.2% and our own province also tenth in the list is not a bad tenth in that we spend 26.1% of our available money on education.

Obviously this is an increase in appropriation of somewhere between two and three million dollars, and this increase, Mr. Speaker, is made up largely in three areas. It is in these three areas that I propose to confine my remarks. And the areas are these: increase in salaries to our public school teachers to an extent roughly of $1,000,000.00, the grants to Universities, and thirdly, the soaring, and rapidly soar- ing, costs of our High Schools and our Elementary Consolidated programme.

Looking very briefly at each of these areas, Mr. Speaker, I would first refer to the salaries and make the observation that I am sure we all recognize, no matter how our school population may be increasing, and it is, no matter how our school buildings are improving, and they are, the most important element in the whole school programme is the teacher. The most important ingredient in my opinion, Mr. Speaker. in the prescription for a nourishing educational diet is the school teacher himself. I think we recognize that in this province we must have the best teachers available, and I am very happy to state that we have many, many fine teachers. We are very anxious to continue to recruit the best people that are obtainable for the teaching profession and then, having recruited them, we hope that we will be able to retain them by paying them a salary which is in keeping with the teaching profes- sion. I think we all recognize that we are moving in the right direction and we finally have teachers’ salaries at a level where they can begin to compete with the salaries being paid in other professions. It is my hope that the Department of Educa- tion will be able to attract the very best minds to the teaching profession, and those that are left over after we have the very best, we will be very happy to see them go into law and medicine, business, social work and other professions. We are striving to get into our Education Department the very best people available. It was with this in mind that we introduced a salary scale this year which as I noted a few moments ago was substantial with respect to increases and represents roughly one million dollars. Now I don’t mind admitting publicly, as I did before the teaching

rofession, that there are many of the teachers who did not get substantial raises. {admit that in many cases this is an unfortunate set of circumstances because many of these senior teachers have given most faithful service, and we try to remind them of this and recognize this in various ways. However, I feel, Mr. Speaker, that look- ing at it from the long-term point of view we cannot, through our scale of increased grants, “bonus” teachers who perhaps through no fault of their own do not have at

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