I appreciate that. I guess the lesson for all of us is that there is no one single solution. There has to be a range of solutions and there have to be people prepared to be flexible and reasonable. I think everything is manageable if you look at it that way. I still would ask the Minister to look at the special case of the centre in Yellowknife. Having met with the parents, the Minister will recognize the frustration and despair that parents have when they have kids with learning disabilities who aren't making it in the system.
When they find a lifeline and for the first time start to see some positive results, that's more important than a dry discussion about policy. We're talking about their kids and hopeless situations. Now there are some results. When we are talking about flexibility, I also think that there are going to be some
cases where compassion and common sense will dictate that something may not fit exactly in a policy but it makes sense.
I would just ask the Minister to be sympathetic towards that particular school. They have quite an extraordinary teacher. Beulah Phillpot has been working with these kids for a long time and they are really, really getting somewhere. They are making progress with these kids. What I would like to see the government doing and the Department of Education doing is when they see success, build on it. As opposed to saying well, your success doesn't fit in with our policies and therefore, we will ensure that ultimately, you'll fail. That doesn't make sense. If they are out there, let's embrace them. Let's change our policies and be proactive in that area.
The last thing I would like to talk about is the recommendation of the Standing Committee on Finance and the partners for youth model. As the Minister knows, and all of us who have been working in government for a few years now, dealing with social problems is probably the most difficult task any of us have and it doesn't lend itself readily to solutions. It is very frustrating and very difficult. If anything, the situation is getting worse rather than better. If you look at this from a school perspective, social problems that have accumulated obviously come into the school. Whatever they are, they manifest themselves in different ways in the school whether it's aggressive behaviour in the playground, or kids aren't able to learn because they didn't have breakfast that morning, the whole range, kids who have been abused. I think it's very important to try to deal with it.
In a lot of communities, the school is the one common place where everybody in that generation for a certain period of time is there. So you can capture a total audience or a target group. Anywhere else you do it in the community you get bits and pieces of it. If you decide that early intervention is important...I think it really is, I think it's key. What the corrections department does, for instance, at the other end costs five times as much to keep them in jail than it does to do something when people are young and much more likely to have success. The studies have shown that if you deal with it in the school it has a tremendous positive impact on the community itself, it spills out. I see the school of the future in the north becoming more of a centre point in a community, more of a focal point that we've seen before as we get more into communications, into modern technology, in to a whole range of options available in the 1990s .
As long as I remember, we've always talked about, and every report that has ever come out that has dealt with social problems always talked about departments having to work together. We've heard that and everybody agrees.
The problem with the way governments are structured in Canada, departmental structures, is that it is functionally impossible to do that, with all the best intentions. It becomes difficult to do because there are vertical hierarchies and the cross linkages aren't there. It's not anyone's fault. I know your deputy Minister works very hard at those relationships. But it is difficult to formalize those relationships on an ongoing basis. A lot of time, it depends on certain individuals who are enlightened enough to see it only works if you work together.
One reason is that from the top down, the concept of harmonization between departments hasn't worked because, structurally, it's difficult. One thing they've found with school-based social delivery programs -- and I talked to people in San Diego where they are using it -- in the inner cities now, in some of the larger cities in the States, where they have much worse social problems than us. They have terrible social problems, a total breakdown, really, of social order in some of the ghettos of the United States -- is that by bringing together in the school, a social worker, nurse, parole officer and the police, the school becomes their point of contact. It's not their departments, but real people actually working together there in the trenches. It is much more difficult far away, like in Yellowknife or in the regional centre.
They found that just having these resources available in the school -- and there is a pilot project in Edmonton, also -- that the costs aren't that much larger. You just refocus where your resources are used and you're able to do a number of things. Things like violence in the schools go down considerably because there are people right there. Second, you're able to identify problem kids very early and you're able to intervene very early with those kids, with a much better chance of providing assistance to them. Third, the positive things in the school start to spread to the community around it. It has really worked.
Like I said, there's no magic in anything. And there is no magic in this solution like any other solution, but the committee feels very strongly that this model is worth a very serious try. We would really like to see this set up in every region by the next school year. Obviously, in some areas, you are not going to have a group of 15 people, as they have in Edmonton. In some regions, it might make sense to have three or four people. Practical reality and common sense will make this thing work. I would just like to hear the Minister's initial response to this type of approach.