Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I have a real problem with regard to the increased number of children in foster care. I think as a government, we should learn from our history and from the past when there was a system of basically assimilating aboriginal children into white society during the 1920's and 1930's, when children were taken away from their parents for five to seven years. They have lost that connection with their parents. They lost that connection to their culture. They lost that connection to the rest of their family.

I think it is important that as a government, we should not be implementing something that is going to reinvent what we are seeing today. We have an aboriginal review that took place by way of a Royal Commission, which made some very strong recommendations on aboriginal children being put into institutions to the point where they are practically bounced from one form of institution. That could be with respect to foster care to juvenile delinquents going into that system, and eventually ending up in our correctional facilities.

I have a real problem with this major increase with regard to children in day care. One of the higher statistical phone calls that I have received in the last year is in the area of children being taken away from their parents. It seems like it has become a point of contention where social workers are now basically law enforcement officers who are going out apprehending children and having to come through the court system with their parents. For me, that is not the way you deal with trying to heal a family or even to protect a child -- to take a child away from its parents regardless of the statistical problems with their parents because of their social conditions such as unemployment.

Everybody knows that in order to find a way to resolve this, we have to look within. The legislation that has been in place, was this the intent of having to see this major increase in the number of children in foster care, because the legislation that was brought forth a couple of years ago? My concern is that we have to change the way we think. We have a major federal initiative going on right now regarding the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which the majority of their focus is on children. I am trying to find a way to reunite children, families in aboriginal communities across the country because of the effects they have seen with hostels in the Northwest Territories.

In the communities I represent, Fort McPherson, the first hospital was built in 1897. In Aklavik, it was 1943. Yet today, we as a government are going back to the same mentality as almost a hundred years ago. I think we have to change the mentality of this government and quit trying to be the lord of the state and start institutionalizing children and the parents where they become social statistics and we need bigger facilities and institutions. Bigger jails. Build bigger care facilities for women, for juvenile delinquents. We have to find a way that we do not start going back to the mentality where we become a system where we are controlling everything.

People should have the ability to raise their families within the means of having the resources at hand to assist them when they need assistance. One of the programs that they have had in my riding with the Tl'oondih Healing Society who developed a family program to assist children, their parents, their grandparents and deal with the whole mentality of dealing with the family as a family -- not an individual that you see someone going to jail and that person is taken care of because he went to jail. You come back to the community and nothing is changed.

Here again, we are taking the children away from their parents, putting them in a different environment, and then wondering why the parents are continuing to drink or continuing to have a real problem trusting the people that they have out there to trust. The RCMP, the social workers, people within their communities that...

I think as a government we have to change the way that we implement programs and services. I believe with Mr. Dent, we do need a child advocacy group out there to ensure that the policies and regulations of this government are in place to protect children, not to protect us as an institution from the parents or the family or the different groups that are out there.

I think we have to somehow change the way we develop and implement programs and services because right now, the majority of the social workers in our communities are dealing with child custody matters. That is taking away the focus on our elders, our focus on people with disabilities, because they do not have enough time in the day to deal with every other issue that is in our communities.

I would strongly suggest to the Minister that you consider looking at some sort of a system that assists families to deal with their problems, deal with it within the family. You can either call family counseling or you can look at a program like they had with the Tl'oondih Healing Society, but implement programs to assist families, not to start institutionalizing our children and our people within our communities, within our society.

I would like to ask the Minister, will you consider looking at implementing a family program to assist families that are in crisis where the children are being taken away and put in foster homes so that they can find a mechanism to reunite those people so that these children do not grow up, as to what happened to their grandparents and their great-grandparents in the 1920's and 1930's, and reinvent the wheel by doing it all over again.

For me, I have a real problem with what is going on with this government, where we see the major increases that you are talking about regarding children who are in foster care today. I would like to ask the Minister, will you consider such a...