Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Once again, I will answer the last question first. We've worked with the Social Programs committee to do a briefing tomorrow at lunch time on the issue of the integrated service delivery model, but speaking mainly to the issue of reclassifying alcohol and drug workers into prevention workers and what is happening in the area of mental health and the clinical supervisors. However, I can tell my colleague what I told this House yesterday, there is no intention to lay people off. We are going to work with the incumbents to give them the skills necessary to do the job. We are going to have the positions reclassified, so there is a basic pay range and some benefits finally that have not been there all these years. There is no intent to take positions out of communities and move them to regional centres.
Speaking to the question and issues around the whole area of child welfare, I agree that there is almost an epidemic when it comes to the need to apprehend children. It's a serious situation. We've put in 20 new social workers over the last two years in addition to the staff we've had. Over the years, we've removed from social workers the burden of doing what we used to call welfare, which they used to say consumed a significant majority of their time. That was removed from them. We've also removed from social workers the issue of doing probation and parole, which is another corrections-related function which limited their ability to do social work. So we've done that, plus we've added social workers. Plus we've tried to add community health reps. We've tried to beef up the alcohol and drug programs. Yet, the need to apprehend children is still there. So we've also taken great pains to try to redo our legislation. In the 13th Assembly, we concluded a 10-year process to redo the child welfare legislation to build in the checks and balances, so that we would involve communities and families and have plan and care communities and avoid and learn from the mistakes of the past. However, the sad reality is that children still suffer neglect, that there are still situations that require social workers and child protection workers to step in and take children into care either briefly or for longer periods because of problems in the communities.
The Member is right, we have not acted on one piece of the legislation. We do have plan and care communities, but what we don't have is the child and family services committee that is supposed to provide a community oversight on child welfare issues, whereas the plan and care committees speak specifically to the issues of individual child welfare matters. As the Member indicated, we have committed to try to work with the community to set up that particular piece that's missing in legislation. We have been remiss in not doing this in other areas. It has probably affected our ability to have as much involvement of communities and handling child welfare matters as possible because that committee was to provide the community oversight and input into what's happening with child welfare matters in the community. The plan and care committees had a much narrower focus. So I accept that we have not met the mark there.
One of the fundamental issues is while we try to do a better job with the children we have to take into care, we have to somehow deal with stemming the need to apprehend children, to work with communities and families to avoid having that situation occur in the first place, which is once again why we are trying to rework our alcohol and drug and mental health services at the community level and bring in an integrated service delivery model to allow the service providers to work more effectively together in a coordinated way. It is not a perfect system, but a lot of the staff at the community level are community people who have been trained and are working in very difficult circumstances. So I thank the Member for his comments and look forward to continuing to work with him and his communities as we try to deal specifically with the issues, in his case, with the communities in his constituency. Thank you.