Mr. Chairman, I know one of the recommendations was to move the corrections over to Justice and that is done, so we can be proud of at least one achievement. There is a recommendation, for instance, that we should look at trying to put together a plan for capital planning. In the Department of Justice we have recently hired a person
to devote strictly to the capital planning work. We are working with the Department of Public Works to help with this strategic planning effort. We have done some training programs that have been suggested, others are under development. For instance, for correctional officers and staff who work in young offenders' facilities we are looking at well-organized training manuals. We are looking at budget planning for the focus to go more from central oriented type of facilities to community planning. We are trying to do a budget analysis of our present budget to come up with some ideas and suggestions on how we could try to develop some flexibility to be able to respond to some of the suggestions on moving towards community and regional types of facilities.
There has been a recommendation that we should look at a new system for information management and keeping track of training. We are working on a new system to meet that recommendation. We hired a manager of information services within the department so we can work on finding solutions on information system problems that have plagued the corrections services division. It has never had an adequate information system. We have had a recommendation that there should be increased communication within the division with the department and specifically with the staff. So we have started meeting with wardens and managers of the different facilities. We have linked up almost all of the facilities with electronic mail and teleconference calls. These are considered taken for granted in some places, but we are just moving into it.
For the recommendations which call for increased accountability and some commitment to regionalizing service delivery, we have looked at ways of regionalizing service delivery within the context of the community transfer initiative. We have had quite a bit of discussion with a number of communities and regions about the Department of Justice, specifically, and what it is prepared to have discussions with specific communities on the area of responsibility that the department now has.
We have a recommendation that calls for increased number adult secure custody beds, repatriation of all federal inmates in the south who are from the Northwest Territories or northern citizens. We have commenced discussions with the agreement of the Solicitor General, we have had a series of meetings with his staff, all of which have been very good. There have been very good discussions, to date, about the exchange agreement and the suggestion that we make the argument that the federal government and ourselves have a great interest and an interest to be served by working out a solution to bring back, to the north, all federal inmates who are from the north and serving time in the south. As I said, presently we do not have adequate training programs available for adults and perhaps young offenders. We have started working on this with communities. We have had discussions with a number of different agencies to try to get some general idea of what kind of programs which should be provided in these facilities. We are seeking input from different communities that we talk to. We have groups such as the Dene Cultural Institute, the Gwich'in Tribal Council, and a number of others who have expressed an interest. That is what we have done to date.
We have put on line, staff people who are hired to be community corrections specialists in most of the regions. We are reviewing the entire staffing. Those are some of the recommendations which we have done some work on. Thank you for listening.