Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about an organization that continually amazes me with its ability to provide services to the women in Yellowknife. I am speaking about the Yellowknife Women's Centre. Mr. Speaker, over the past eight years, the Yellowknife Women's Centre has established itself as an outreach crisis service centre for women and their families. The services provided by the Women's Centre addresses the most basic needs of marginalized women and their families. I am talking about food, clothing and shelter in addition to supportive programming and counselling, parenting, pre-natal and post-natal outreach and family support. Women access the centre for programming that simply does not exist elsewhere in the community, including from the government. The centre is faced with responding to needs and demands of services and referrals from government and non-government agencies in Yellowknife and the NWT.
Mr. Speaker, in 1997-98, the Yellowknife Women's Centre served 375 client families. Those are families, not individual people, at its emergency and crisis location on 47th Street which represented an 87 percent increase over 1996. In other words, the people that they provided services to increased almost double and the majority of those clients are aboriginal people and approximately one-third to one-half of them are from other communities in the Northwest Territories. In this way, the centre is unique because it offers services to people from outside of Yellowknife. It often finds women on its doorstep who have moved to Yellowknife because there are more services here in Yellowknife for their children, they want to get away from an abusive situation or the woman simply has had a baby here and refuses to go home. Unfortunately, while the centre is responding to territorial needs, it only receives funding as a local centre. Mr. Speaker, territorial women's groups receive funding in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the centre only receives $30,000 in core funding. Clearly, such limited funding hardly covers even a partial salary for the executive director, not to mention operating expenses. Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.