Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The community empowerment strategy is a welcome development for the people in the West. The people have been asking for years to be able to take over programs and services. I am in total support of allowing the communities to provide their own programs and services, particularly through the use of block funding. That will allow communities to choose their own priorities and to move in the directions that they wish, provided that maintain certain minimum standards.
At times, the empowerment would have to be done at the community level and it would also have to be done at regional levels as well. The best way to ensure the success of the implementation of the community empowerment strategy is to utilize the existing aboriginal organizations that work and preside over certain areas. Those organizations already exist. They meet periodically and, for the most part, the people in those communities see them as the regional government.
I know that the social envelope has been working on a community empowerment framework. I understand that it is being completed. It is extremely important that the MLAs get a briefing on this framework before we go back to our communities; before the others go back to their communities, since I live here. I feel it is important that this briefing happens before people leave because if it doesn't happen, there won't be another opportunity when everyone is here for quite a while. I don't think we should go until September or October before people receive a briefing on community empowerment.
There are a lot of meetings in the West that occur with the aboriginal organizations. They meet in the summertime and have their general assemblies, and those are really good times to visit with the people and to discuss community empowerment and any other initiative that we wish to relay information and generate discussion on.
However, the other thing I wanted to mention is that we have other initiatives such as the community wellness initiative, the community justice initiative and now the community empowerment initiative. All of these initiatives seem to go hand in hand. It seems to me that we should have them all working together and that the easiest way to do this would be to have all those initiatives in the same envelope. Perhaps it's time to look at some way of doing
that. Is it time to move MACA into the social envelope or something like that? It must be difficult for two different envelopes to be meeting. I'm sure the social envelope people must be meeting with MACA in order to strategize, and it would be a lot easier if all people involved were in the same envelope.
So I would like to hear the Minister's thoughts on particularly the briefing, and also the possibility of having these community initiatives all under the same envelope structure. Thank you.