Thank you, Madam Chair. Yesterday we had quite a good debate on a number of aspects of justice and the administration of justice in the Territories. Our motion, Madam Chair, had a focus and a purpose on it in that it sought to encourage the government to do more to enable communities to be more involved and to take greater responsibility in the administration and in the sentencing, the accountability on the part of the offender and hopefully the restoration of that person back into the good books of the community, if you will.

The aspect of this that has intrigued me for some time, Madam Chair, is the notion that our conventional system of justice whereby an alleged offender is first of all apprehended by police officers or some other authority that they may or may not know or have much connection with. Then they go through a series of procedures with lawyers, with prosecutors and other people in the justice system, again that they probably don't know and in the case of our smaller communities, people who fly in for a few hours or maybe a day or two every few weeks or months. A judge, in the same circumstances, may not even be from their region, let alone from the community. A sentence may be rendered that takes them out of their region, puts them into a facility with no connection with the offender's real life and then after a time they are put back in with the expectation that they have served their penalty, if you will. They may have undergone some treatment or some program to help them along. Then at the end of the day they go back into their community, and quite likely, Mr. Chairman, into the same circumstances that probably resulted in them offending in the first place.

This is where if -- again, my own notion -- anyone is to be able to change their behaviour or their lifestyle, they have to take responsibility for what they do. When our court system isolates an offender and a victim, separates them, then there is no chance for responsibility to be addressed for the offences to be dealt with at that face-to-face level. I really don't see how we are going to be able to be effective. Certainly now, and in the past, I don't think it has much going for it and I just can't see it continuing in the future. That is why I think that anything that we can do to bring the administration and the implementation of justice to the community level, would probably be one of the most progressive things we can do.

We had a discussion on some aspects of this in our debate yesterday, but I would like to continue exploring this. Certainly with Mr. Cooper's experience on the frontlines of justice here for many years, I would really appreciate the Minister's and the deputy's comments to this notion of mine, that community-based justice is probably something that would do us better than what we are doing now. Am I on the right track with that, Mr. Chairman?