Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In terms of community justice, I would agree with the Member that it would make a lot more sense if we could get community justice committees to do even more than they do. But you know, we're actually quite lucky in the Northwest Territories. They are very active. We have committees in 30 communities in the Northwest Territories. So we have managed to get them set up and active in pretty well every community in the Northwest Territories. We are going to be, this year, adding $237,000 to make it available to communities that have community justice committees to apply for so they can get extra funding. We are still going to have one community justice coordinator who is available to support committees if one of the committees gets in trouble and needs an extra hand.
What we were hearing from most of the communities was that they were doing enough business that they needed more money to be able to take on more cases. So now we're going to make it available for communities to do that. I can tell the Member that if it comes to pass that we're finding we still don't have enough money, that I will certainly be prepared to go out to look for more money to support community justice committees. I think they do a tremendous job. Diverting people from the court system and keeping them out of the courts is a better way to deal with offenders than it is to stick them into the system. So that isn't something that is in danger of being cut on my watch. It is something that I am quite prepared to support further investment in as communities show they can put the money to good use.
In terms of the Member having pointed out that in smaller communities we face many of the same security risks that are faced by the people attending court in Yellowknife, he's absolutely right. That's true. It's a situation where we are using whatever buildings we can to provide the courts in those communities. The real problem though is that in Yellowknife the courts are sitting here for 267 days a year. Most communities they're only sitting a dozen days a year at most. So it's pretty tough to deal with some of those capital issues that we would have for that level. Unfortunately this isn't something that anybody from Yellowknife can be proud of. That's the nature of the operation of the courts here. We're talking about a huge number of sitting days in Yellowknife in comparison to anywhere else in the Territories. So we have to deal with that somehow.
As I've said, we have started to rent more and more space in Yellowknife to try and deal with the space shortage, but in the long run it doesn't make sense to keep doing that. As I've pointed out, if we start with this planning money that's in the budget right now, we still won't have a courts building until 2010 and by that time it will have become way more of a crisis here to deal with the shortage of space.
The Member asked what we're doing to assist with the administration of justice in the communities and I think it's important to remember that we've invested some of the new legal aid money in providing advance travel for lawyers to visit clients in the communities. The clients in the communities are now not just faced with seeing the lawyer the same day of the court sitting, but they get the chance to meet with their counsel before the courts are held in their community. I also want to say that I don't expect that we will be talking about consolidating the court registries here in the foreseeable future. So it's not an issue that this is being done for that purpose. The government has agreed to continue with the court registries in Inuvik and Hay River. We have no plans to put that one back on the table.