Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to getting that information and see that the policy is carried out and a new agreement is in place with the Solicitor General. That is an area that I have had concerns about.

The other area is in regard to the wilderness camps. I have dealt with an individual in Aklavik for some time, and he is getting frustrated. He is not able to maintain his operation because of the lack of clients. The area I have concerns with is we have a lot of people incarcerated in Yellowknife who are sent there for a limited period of time, somewhere from three to six months. That cost alone is pretty high for this government.

Also, the problem we are having putting more money in expanding an institution, in regard to YCI, to the tune of almost $10 million, I have a concern about where we should have more money put into prevention and more money in regard to follow-up programs for these individuals.

Once you are incarcerated and let back into the community, there are no real programs to assist you in dealing with the problems you had when you left the community, and then having to come back to that same environment. Nothing is really changed. You just went to jail and you are back in the community. The problems are still there with alcoholism and unemployment, and developing your self-esteem. There has to be follow-up programs delivered in communities to assist these people, rather than just incarcerating them and saying the problem will just go away. You see a real trend with these repeat offenders. You know it is just an ongoing process.

I think for those individuals who are convicted for the first time, doing a short sentence, say six months or three months, that we allow them to do it through these camps, through programs delivered by these camps, or even at outlets outside of these communities, so they can feel that they are not just going to go sit in jail for a couple of months. They are going to come out with something positive and do it within the community or within the region they come from. So the community knows that at least the offender has made an attempt to change, has tried to deal with his problem, and when he returns to the community, knows that he can work with those organizations or people in the community help him deal with the problem at hand, whether violence, alcoholism, or being unemployed. These things have to be looked at in terms of the social conditions that these people are living in.

I think we have been incarcerating these people for so long that a lot of these problems that we have in our small communities are preventable. We just have to put the resources and the people in place in the communities and the regions to deal with the problems at the community and regional level. We should not go back to the old system of depending on people from the south, or on people at the regional centres through hostels or jails or what not, to deal with our problems. These are our problems. We should have the resources and the abilities to deal with them in our communities. I would like to ask the Minister, have you considered a program such as this in each of the regions or even in the different cultural groups so they can take hold of the ownership of dealing with the social and economic situations that we find ourselves in, where people are being incarcerated strictly because of their lifestyle?

Unless anything changes in your lifestyle, you will always be stuck in that cycle of poverty, unemployment and alcoholism. Unless you change the individual or change the climate that these individuals are in, nothing is going to change. I would like to ask the Minister, have you considered revamping justice instead of building bigger institutions, starting to deal with the human aspects of justice in our communities and regions?