Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We will be looking at ways to allow communities to invest their dollars in the near future. Thank you.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If the MLAs don't keep me here until September or October, we can do a briefing. We will be talking to the MLAs on community empowerment, if they would like to have a briefing while we're here for the session. I will ask my deputy minister to give more detail on the envelope structure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, MACA currently does attend all of the Social Program committee meetings and we have done for some time. There is a lot of effort put into trying to coordinate community empowerment with community wellness, with income support reform and with the early childhood development initiatives in Education. We're currently coordinating all of those efforts by making sure that all the progress reports are dealt with at the same meeting, that we have the same people working on the team. There is quite frequent and close communication between the different deputies who are working on these initiatives.

MACA isn't formally a member of the social envelope, but I can certainly assure Members that we're fully involved with the social envelope and communicating very closely at the DM level and at the other levels, as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The recommendations for legislative changes that were given to us from the meeting, we will be dealing with in legislation. The more complex ones will follow shortly after that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There has to be one governing body for the transfers to take place in a community. For some communities where they have a band council and a settlement or hamlet council or a Metis organization at the community level, they would have to work together in order for this to happen. Aklavik is a very good example where the band, the Metis and the hamlet have decided to work together on empowerment, and we support that, that there should be one body willing to work together so we can filter the government funds through that body. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With regard to community transfer initiatives, we have allocated some funds to the regions to hire somebody to help the communities that are ready to do community transfers. The regional superintendents have been meeting on community empowerment. I would like this to be done as soon as possible, so we are working on that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I fully agree with the Member from Fort Smith. We have a community empowerment steering committee and we will be coming forward with a plan on community empowerment, and I will be making a statement on community empowerment in the next few days.

We fully support that the communities need to see how it's going to be done or how they will want it to be done within their community. There will have to be a plan for them to understand and be able to proceed with their plan, so there will have to be some community development workshops happening in the communities at the same time. The staff will be available to go into any meetings in the region to promote community empowerment as presenters; so, just to let the Members know that we will be available for any meetings that will happen in the future, we will be coming forward with a plan from the Community Empowerment Steering Committee that has been established which is chaired by Penny Ballantyne of MACA and other DMs from Health and Social Services, Economic Development and Tourism, and Public Works & Services are also involved. I agree with the Member: There has to be a plan in place, and we are doing that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.