Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The department did get an appropriation at the end of the fiscal year for foster care because of the increased numbers of cases that we experienced in that year. We are working hard now to try to determine whether or not we had an extraordinary increase that's just an anomaly, whether it is just something that will only happen once, or whether this is something we can expect to see on an ongoing basis. It's not clear at this point. We don't have an answer to that yet, we need to do more research on it.

We are looking at some initiatives that will help us over the coming year to cut down on the number of cases where we are required to apprehend children and place them in foster care. One of the first things is development of an early intervention strategy with the Departments of Justice and Education, Culture and Employment. We hope to be able to build on some of the suggestions that were given to us by the Standing Committee on Finance and the Special Committee on Health and Social Services about implementing school-based services for youth, along the lines of the model that is operating in Arviat where at-risk children are identified early and the departments cooperate to find ways to provide support to the children and family so they don't come into care. That's the first initiative.

The second thing is the development of two pieces of legislation on children and family services and adoptions, as a follow-up to the good work that was done over the years in child welfare reform. The focus of the Family and Children Services Act is to find ways to get communities to take ownership of some of the problems and find solutions that will bring community resources to bear to keep children in their homes with relatives, to find help for the parents, and to provide counselling services through the resources available in the communities and the regions.

Part of the community action fund philosophy is to try to help communities find ways to implement innovative new projects that will result in healthier families at the community level. There is $3.2 million in that fund and we're developing the guidelines for it at the moment. It's intended to provide some help in terms of early intervention. We think that, unless we start getting to children and families before these problems occur, we're going to continue to see an increase in the number of times we have to investigate families, apprehend children, place them in foster care, and process department adoptions to find new families for them.

There is a lot of work under way to, first of all, assess the problem but, secondly, to find cooperative ways to deal with it. Thank you.