Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My comments are more around the area of implementation and realistic terms in implementing emergency protection orders in communities where you don't have the facilities with regard to shelters. I think realistically we have to realize and ensure that there's a system in place that works in all aspects of our smaller communities or medium-sized communities. A lot of times legislation gets passed in this House with great intentions, but what it does is cause chaos in a lot of our small communities who don't have the resource people or the resources for facilities or programs to assist in those areas. We can sit here and talk about why the legislation is there, but I think we have to dig a little deeper and find the stem of where these problems come from.

There are many communities who depend on seasonal employment three or four months of the year. The rest of the year you are having to live on income support, social housing, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence. These things are an aspect of life, but you have to get to the core problems. Where do these things stem from? I think you can go back two or three generations to your great-grandparents when the day the North was being occupied through the fur trade and the hostels and the major influx of southern societies as we know them today. Most aboriginal communities have lost the whole aspect of family. Many people have seen violence going on for two or three decades. Violence is in our communities. The frustration is that people are seeing their children going through the same cycle as they did. I think we have to find ways of changing that cycle of life, so that we can find a healthy society that we work with.

The key to me to deal with that is you have to have good programs and services to assist those people who realize at the end of the day they might not have good parenting skills or good social skills. Being illiterate is not a crime. There are people out there who are not as lucky as most of us. They have the right to have the means of dealing and coping in our society. They know they have to change the way they do things and they know there is help out there for them. Help is only as good as what you receive from it.

I have been lecturing the Minister of Health and Social Services for the last week, but I was doing it to prove a point. We have a system that does not work in our communities. We have programs that aren't even delivered in our communities. I think it's important that we, as a government, realize that when we pass legislation, we should have a system in place that has 100 percent guarantee that you can implement that legislation that you pass. I think what we've done is adopted good legislation from other parts of Canada, but other parts of Canada do not deal with systemic problems in the Northwest Territories. It very much saddens me to see a family member, relative or see their children being taken away, seeing families broken up, seeing the grandparents raising their grandchildren and not enjoying their retirement. Much of that stems from alcoholism, which happens everywhere in the Northwest Territories. Who supplies the most amount of alcohol in the Northwest Territories? The Northwest Territories Liquor Commission, an agency of the Government of the Northwest Territories.

We can incarcerate all the people in the world, we can pass all the laws and make a lot of legislation, but unless we deal with the systemic problem which we all know is out there, we can sit here day in and day out, pass legislation, take children away, break up families and have a system in place that gives the whole administration arm of government by way of enforcement of our legislation to do anything less than what people have done for the last 100 years. The greatest thing to do is incarcerate people, put them away and they're dealt with. It's great we have legislation to protect families and protect people from injuring each other, but I think before we move on any more legislation, we have to, as a government, ensure that we have the resources to deal with the problems when they are there and have a workable system in place.

We have money now sitting at the health board for alcohol and drug workers. It's been sitting there for two years and the biggest problem in my communities is people calling me and crying to the Minister on the speakerphone that they can't get alcohol and drug programs to go to a treatment centre in Hay River. If we can't deal with those little things, how do you expect us to deal with something like this?

I think it's very hard for me to see a relative that comes to me and says my kids were taken away because there really is nothing I can do about it because they are protected under legislation. We have to make sure we do pass laws that have the intentions that they are set for, but also have the ability to implement what we intend through the passing of that legislation. We need to make sure we have the tools to not only deal with the victim, but also deal with the prosecutor and the offender, so we don't start institutionalizing people to the point where that is the only easy way to deal with our problems. We could spend $50 million building jails, but we can't spend a couple hundred thousand to find alcohol and drug funding to establish a treatment centre in the Northwest Territories. We have one facility in the Northwest Territories and we all know what the problem is.

So I think it's important to ensure we pass legislation. We do have to have the tools to protect families and our children, but we also have to realize that being poor, being illiterate, living on social assistance for most of your life does not make you a bad parent. I think because of who you are and where you live, it should mean something to those people who realize there is a way to change your life. Giving them the tools to help them change is all most families in communities are asking for.

So as the Minister and department responsible for this legislation, I would like to ask at the end of the day that you have a system in place that can measure the legislation you bring forward ensuring that first it does what you want it to do and improve the lives of people in our communities and ensure we do away with violence, alcoholism and homelessness, people who don't have a job and people who are dealing with illiteracy. That is the stem of our problem. We have a responsibility to ensure that when we pass legislation, we have the ability to enact it and also implement it so it finds a system that avoids seeing large numbers of people incarcerated or large numbers of victims because we don't have the tools to deal with the sole problems in our society. With that, mahsi cho.

---Applause