Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have had a lot of concerns, and I have been receiving calls from my constituency, especially when children end up being taken away from their families because of alcohol problems within the families. I think that we as a government have to do more to try to reunite families than to take their children away and not deal with the problems at home, especially when we are dealing with alcohol. In a lot of the native communities, it is a problem, but there are people there who can help to try to offset that problem.

When it comes to aboriginal children being taken away from the communities and are brought here to Yellowknife, because of the distance and what not, we have to do more as a government to find ways of working with the families to work out their problems or their difficulties so that we can reunite families instead of having the problems that we have seen in the past, especially where we have seen children taken away to go to hostels for quite a few years, and the problems we are now seeing because of that.

I think aboriginal children should be allowed to remain in the communities with relatives, grandparents, if possible. I have been approached by grandparents who wanted these children to remain in the community but yet the department made the decision to have them sent to Yellowknife.

I think it is important that as a government, you just mentioned that we will be spending a couple of million dollars to find these people to deal with the major problem. We cannot continue to do what we think is best for someone because we know best. I think we as a government have to start realizing that we cannot continue to play big daddy or big momma, because we are not there to take people away from families. At the end of it all, we have a bigger problem after doing that, especially learning from the hostel experience in the Northwest Territories. It is not a perfect world that we think it is.

In the long term, we pay for it through the correctional system, the jail system, and also the health system because of the effects on the family in areas of alcoholism, drug abuse, and whatnot. We as a government have to start doing more to find ways to assist families where we know there is an alcohol problem, to send them for treatment as a family, as a unit. If there is a problem with one person in the family, you do not send the one person away and then they come back to the family and nothing changes. You have to change the problems that originate in the whole community.

The biggest problem in our communities, as everyone knows, is alcoholism, especially when it comes to family break-ups or children being taken away from families. I bet you 99.9 percent of the time it is because of alcohol. I think if anything we should be putting more money into alcohol and drug treatment programs and make sure that the parents of those children have the option; that they take the treatment, take the program and then they will be able to access their children. Do not take them away from the community, their region, their grandparents, and take them to another foreign place, regardless of if it is the city of Yellowknife or Edmonton.

We have seen too much of that where people say, "We know what is best for you. We will take your problems out of your community" and at the end they do not help with the original problem in the community to begin with. I think as a government we have to do more and find new ways and initiatives rather than just being the big hammer and saying "We know what is best for you, and will continue to do it because we have the laws, regulations and jurisdiction because we passed legislation in this House giving us that power".

I think you have to put some of that power back to the people, back to the communities, especially in the communities where you have some good people who are trying to do some good things. They get frustrated when they see that the problem is there, and all you do is take the individual out of the community. You do not deal with the problem at the root.

With that, I would like to ask the Minister exactly what she is doing to improve reuniting families and children with their parents, especially the First Nations people, tribes and cultures that are up here to ensure that those children do not lose sight of that because they were taken away? We have seen that happen elsewhere in Canada.