Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This government stands committed to regional involvement with communities or regional and community involvement in the justice process, and that's why we have community

justice committees. That's why we're adding funding for the community justice committees to be involved in justice. We are also committed because we support the courts to travel to each and every community to conduct the courts as they are necessary.

Mr. Speaker, when we're talking about Dene K'onia, I don't disagree that we have tremendous programming and tremendous staff resources there, but, Mr. Speaker, in the last few weeks we've had one, sometimes two young inmates from south of the lake. Spending $1.5 million a year for that number of inmates is not a good expenditure of taxpayer dollars. We can't afford to keep two facilities in operation in the Northwest Territories with the numbers of people that we have in custody. So we have to take a look at rationalizing that expenditure somehow.

Very few people from any single community south of the lake are housed in the remand facility in Hay River. This doesn't mean that if somebody is sentenced to jail from that region that they wouldn't wind up in the South Mackenzie Correctional Centre, but the average length of time in remand is 31 days. So after that period of time, the inmate would likely be housed in a facility that is close to their family and relatives. But again, it's a matter of saving money. That's $400,000, more or less, that we can save, plus or minus $5,000 or $10,000 we think. That's still a significant amount of money. So between the two, we propose savings of $2 million and that isn't something that is easy to ignore. Those are big savings and if we actually do have the money for that kind of expenditure, then we should take a look at where that fits into the priorities of Members of this House and priorities of government. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.