Thank you, Mr. Chairman and good afternoon. Mr. Chairman, the Department of Justice, like other departments within this government, over the last couple of years have suffered from the deficit reduction strategies of the government. I think two areas of justice have not been on the front burners as much as they should have been.

One of those would be the correction services itself and the lack of space for the inmates. The YCC and BCC are overcrowded. I believe the last figures I saw were that YCC itself was at 115 percent occupancy, and I believe Baffin Correctional Centre was 100 percent or 95 percent or even more. The Department of Justice has to get strong with our federal counterparts to help us in the area of building new correctional facilities. The facilities that we have today were not built for the demand that is in place.

Another concern that I have and has been brought forth to me in conversations in E-mails over the past few weeks is the need for a dedicated remand centre for women. Right now if a woman is taken into custody, there is no dedicated facility for a female. That is not acceptable. We have to look at some type of remand facility for women, a facility that maybe would be dedicated to women. We are seeing more and more people who are being incarcerated who are female and we do not have that ability right now.

I understand that like a lot of things, we have a wish list. There is a serious concern the previous Minister mentioned here in the House that, indeed, the BCC and the YCC had exceeded capacity. We have to do something with it. I know we do not have the funds, but we cannot just throw our hands up in the air and say nothing could be done. I would applaud the Minister on the direction he is taking the department in trying to open up facilities. Alternate facilities like the camps, to hopefully serve a purpose to take people out of the jails. The whole idea in the corrections area is that you incarcerate people for the sake of rehabilitating them, not just to put them in there, do their time and then they get out. The Department of Justice has made some good strides over the last couple of years in trying to facilitate education classes for academic upgrading for the inmates. The recent episode in Iqaluit where we had an untrained psychologist, who is now before the courts, but that was a concern and later. We could find out exactly what type of resource they were going to dedicate to these facilities.

Moving on within the corrections area of the Department of Justice is the concern with the incarceration rates and also the concern with what is actually happening in the facilities. In my riding, where the Baffin correctional centre is located, we have seen quite a drop in the number of aboriginal or Inuit employees in the correctional centre over the past few years. That needs to be addressed. This has been mentioned to me several times by people in the community itself. It may have something to do with the stigma attached to working in those types of facilities or the stress. I do know, for example, last year that Arctic College was offering a training program for wardens and justice people. At the same time the Justice Department was trying to duplicate a similar program and actually paying people $15.00 an hour to take a course. We brought it up in the House with the previous Minister about the contradiction in that. That was a concern. I think the Department of Justice should be coordinating closer in the regions with the college when these types of programs and training opportunities present themselves.

On the camps themselves, I think the camp initiative, as I said earlier, is a good one. We did have a camp in my riding that was cut two years ago because we went to the per diem amount. The problem we have with the per diem amount is because of the referral service between the judiciary side of justice. If there are no inmates or no people referred to the camp, then the camp does not get any money, but the people in the camp, using an outpost camp as an example, they still have to live there. They still have costs and expenses. I have a concern with that and hopefully it would be addressed. I guess that would be the beginning of my opening comments, Mr. Chairman. I would like just a general overview of what we are actually doing in the area of corrections and the needs. I should, actually, point out one other thing, Mr. Chairman, and that is several of our people in the YCC and the BCC should not be in a correctional facility. I think it is obvious to anyone who has been to the facilities or who is involved in justice, know that a lot of people have other problems other than criminal activity. We have major problems with mental illness and because we do not have any type of facility in the Northwest Territories, we end up referring and sending people to correctional facilities when in actuality they probably should be in other facilities. That is something I think the department has acknowledged and hopefully we could address.

Again, I know it all comes down to money but maybe our federal counterparts could help us. I would like to see a dedicated facility somewhere in Nunavut because after division one of the ideas of Nunavut, of course, was to bring people and government closer. To continue to have to send our people 2,000 miles away to Yellowknife or the south is not acceptable. I would like to know if the department has a plan or have they looked at a plan of expanding existing correctional facilities or hopefully building us some type of federal or remand centre somewhere in the Nunavut settlement area? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.