Thank you, Mr. Chair. The on-the-land program that the Member asks about, a judge can't sentence an offender to go to this kind of program. It has to be a situation where the offender chooses. They can only go if they are already ready for a temporary absence. They have to be approved for temporary absence from a secure facility to be sent to one of these facilities. Basically, they have to have concluded one-sixth of their sentence and be judged to be a good security risk before they can be sent out to them, because they're not prisons. There are no fences and inmates are using firearms and so on. You basically have to be ready for full release before you're allowed to go out on these things.
The whole purpose is to have elders work with the inmates and have inmates reintegrate into their traditional lifestyle. That's the basic premise to an on-the-land program. It isn't the sort of situation where you would want an RCMP officer showing up to police what's going on. This is supposed to be something that's driven by elders and respect for the land.
The programs are generally pretty successful with the guys who agree to take the programming, but it's not easy. This isn't like a tourist lodge, and we haven't had people jumping up and down to go out to them. That's why we're trying to market it, because we think it's a good idea. We think it's good to get people out on the land. We're prepared to increase the amount of money that we pay the inmates, not the operators. We increased the funding for the operators this fiscal year and now we're looking at increasing the incentive pay that we pay the inmates for attending this kind of programming. In fact, if they work for one of the operators and provide services over and above what is typically expected, they may even be paid more by the operators.
So it is an opportunity for the inmates to, when they finish their term, actually have a little bit of change in their pocket so they have more options, too. They're not just out on the street with nothing in their hands, which could lead to a lot of problems.
The Member asked questions about the legislative drafting. I want to make it clear that most of the drafting of legislation is done by our government lawyers in-house. We have four. If we wanted to do it all in-house, we'd have to increase the staff. As the Member will be aware, when you have legislative proposals that go through the system, sometimes we get hit with five or six bills that need to be drafted. So we have a real demand. But then there may be a couple of months that go by and we don't have that sort of thing coming up for awhile. If we were going to staff up to deal with all the peaks then we'd have a lot of lawyers sitting around doing nothing when we have those valleys. It's more cost-effective for us to contract out some of the drafting. But I want to make it very clear that we don't do that much. Most of the drafting is actually done in-house.
And we don't charge for legal counsel. So if a department needs advice, all they have to do is ask for it. The legal counsel is given. But we don't send a lawyer along with everybody in government when they're talking about things; we wait for people to ask for the advice. As soon as it's asked for, though, it's responded to. So that's the way the requests for legal advice are handled.
In terms of the courthouse, we have space issues and security issues that we have to address. We're finding more and more often that we don't have the space for the courts to operate in Yellowknife. We had to rent out and fit up some premises this last year for about $350,000 for just one trial. We had to rent space in a hotel in Yellowknife a couple of weeks ago for another court case. We know there is another case coming up this year that we are going to have to rent more space for because we can't accommodate it within the space we have in the courthouse. The issue is one of not having the space right now and we're going to wind up paying more and more for rental space around town and still not really deal with the issue. So eventually we have to start dealing with it. If we're already at that point right now, we're talking about not having a courthouse in place, if we start this year, until 2010. By 2010 it would be an impossible situation if we didn't start the process now. So that's the reason we've advanced it at this point. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.