Mr. Chase: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Inspiring education? Mr. Minister, your do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do government spent millions of taxpayer dollars on a feel-good travelling public relations road show entitled Inspiring Education. You spent thousands more on self congratulatory Success by 6 newspaper ads. The hypocritical actions of your ministry have more to do with conspiring than inspiring. Do you expect students, parents, teachers, or trustees to be inspired by your first round of $80 million cutbacks to educational programming?

Mr. Hancock: Mr. Speaker, I may get to the actual question, but first I need to correct the suppositions. First of all, the advertisement with respect to Success by 6 was an advertisement on a fundraising piece that was done by me privately with an organization. It's not government money, doesn't involve government money. This is the 10th year we've run this very successful golf tournament to raise money for Success by 6 because I care about kids and their start and I care about that organization, what it does in our community.

I certainly won't apologize for spending money doing what governments do, which is to look to the horizon and plan the future. So Inspiring Education, which has been actually well accepted both in stakeholder communities and in the public as a very robust discussion about the future of education, is a very, very important investment for Albertans.

The Speaker: The hon. member.

Mr. Chase: Thank you. Mr. Speaker, if you want to achieve success by six, full-day kindergartens, fund them; half-day junior kindergartens, fund them; pay for breakfast programs rather than for ads. Are teachers to be inspired by a five-year contract, supposedly bargained in good faith, whose conditions have been unilaterally rewritten by your government halfway through the term?

Mr. Hancock: Mr. Speaker, I guess we'll get back to the $80 million later, but on the average weekly earnings question, that is implicit in what the hon. member has said, again I need to correct the misapprehension that he's put forward. Nobody has ripped up any contracts or in any way denigrated the contracts.

There's a very simple issue to be determined, and that is the question of how you determine average weekly earnings when the people who used to determine it changed the process. The contracts were written on one basis. There's a new basis in place. There's a very legitimate discussion between ourselves and the ATA with respect to how that should be calculated. We have agreed with the ATA to move forward in arbitration on that issue.

It's not a question of not honouring the contracts — we want to honour the contracts; we will honour the contracts — but we do need to have an interpretation of the meaning of that term.

Mr. Chase: Then we have our Premier going around with a cup to public-sector unions saying: please take a wage freeze. I suppose that's part of the contract. Do you honestly believe that grade 12 students, forced by your ministry's failure to schedule appropriately, will be inspired by having to write math and chem 30 exams on the same day?

Mr. Hancock: First of all, they won't have to write chem 30 and math on the same day. A schedule is going out. There was a schedule published. Two jurisdictions indicated that. As soon as I got feedback that that was what happened — I hadn't seen it — I said to my department that it's not appropriate to have two exams of that nature on the same day and that we needed that fixed. The new announcement with respect to the exam schedule will be out imminently.