Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is no secret that, as a government, we've had difficulty, over the past few years, trying to balance the demands of large growing urban centres like Iqaluit and Yellowknife, and the increasing social problems that manifests with the need, on the other hand, of small communities like Trout Lake, Resolute and many other small outlying communities that need the most basic policing services. That is, one member of the RCMP to be permanently resident in their communities. We've had ongoing discussions with the RCMP about this problem.

I have taken the view that we should, especially in consideration of the women, the elderly and the children in the communities -- those who are the least able to defend and protect themselves -- that there should be at least one person always present in the communities to give them the sense of safety and security. That has been my view. At the same time, I recognize that we do have escalating problems in places like the city of Yellowknife.

Ultimately, it will be, perhaps, political will that will dictate on how we settle where the limited resources should go. I think the RCMP will also be making some suggestions, in the next few months, on how they propose to reorganize and allocate their members in response to demands that face them every day. A review is going to be done in small measure to look at the work that RCMP members do, especially in small communities.

There was a time when the RCMP did all the work of the federal government and was the dispenser of drugs for people and dogs. They did welfare work and worked in many other areas. Over the years, through direct and indirect redefinitions of workloads, this has changed and diminished. I think it may be time to look at their role again. For instance, the RCMP are still inoculating dogs in some communities. Surely, there are other resources that could be used to decrease their workloads. That is the main difficulty facing many members in the small detachments. We need to look at that.

I have also suggested to the department that we look very seriously at the suggestion that there will come a time when we can expect communities, community leaders and parents to take more responsibility for policing themselves, their neighbourhoods and their children. There will need to be some attempts made by communities to identify ways to address the problems that demand that more and more police forces be made available in our communities. There may be a day when we can say that unless communities come up with some concrete approaches to resolving some of these problems, we will simply start to roll back the number of RCMP members that are allocated in each community.

If you look at the allocations across the north right now, there are large discrepancies on a per capita basis. Yellowknife is one example. There are other communities which are of similar size across the territories that have a huge difference in the number of members assigned. We have a pilot project that we just initiated a week ago, to have a joint funding arrangement with the federal government, to look at training some community members from Fort Good Hope and Coral Harbour. They will train for a month or so in Regina, return to their communities and be available to assist RCMP to carry out their policing duties. We will see if that sort of approach will help in getting communities to take more responsibility and ownership for policing work and to diminish the demands on the police in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.