Mr. Speaker, we have group homes, we have foster homes, we have arrangements. We have two facilities of our own as I have indicated: Trail Cross and the Territorial Treatment Centre here in Yellowknife. We have arrangements with a number of facilities in Alberta and in Saskatchewan. The issue that provoked this debate was the Member's statement and vandalism and what happens when children in the community are out of control. Their family is the first starting point.
We as a department have learned a hard lesson where if we just arbitrarily reach in -- because there's a concern and we yank the child out, put them in the permanent wardship, we ship them off because of something that they may have done that's inappropriate -- that has led in the past to a whole history of problems with permanent wards, children in systems that are there until they graduate at 18 out to the adult system, because that's all they've known is institutional life. So there are vehicles, but, very clearly, we have learned that to start to deal with problems at the community level with families and children you have to involve the children and the families and the community.
I've heard here and I know from personal experiences to try to keep the children in the communities and work with them to resolve their behaviour. We also know that if you take a child out of the community and put them in a facility, when they come out unless there has been some work done at the community level and at the family level then the chance that they are going to revert to the same kind of behaviour that got them into trouble in the first place is very, very high. So this is not just a simple issue of do we have enough places to park all the children in our communities that are causing us problems. There are some very, very fundamental issues to do with families and their role in this and how we work collaboratively to try to deal with these problems, recognizing the history we have and the mistakes we've made in the past with the child welfare system. Thank you.