Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I am disappointed to hear that these 11 positions, as the Minister says, have been put on hold for a year. Of course, since last year he told us they were going to be in place for 2003-04, there is no guarantee obviously that we are going to see them come back in 2004-2005. So that causes me a lot of concern. I recognize that we have been expanding the services in mental health workers and alcohol and drug workers, as the Minister has spoken about. I think it's important that we take a look at what's happening with social workers. The caseload tends to be so high that I am not sure that social workers have the opportunity to do the job, in many cases, that they should or would like to do.
I take a look at statistics for child apprehensions in the Northwest Territories and compare that to the statistics in other jurisdictions. I have to say that it looks pretty alarming to see how many kids we are apprehending right now. If we had an adequate number of social workers, I would suspect that we would be able to get more help to families and probably wind up needing to apprehend fewer children. I suspect that if you take the cost of keeping a child in care, it wouldn't take too many successes at keeping families together to pay for the salaries of social workers. So I am afraid that the approach we are taking here is one much like justice and incarceration. We are dealing with after effects instead of being proactively involved at trying to solve the problem within the family. Has the Minister had some work done to examine whether or not we could defray the cost of adding social workers through reductions in the cost of child apprehensions?