Madam Chair, I am pleased to do that. I want to thank the committee for their support in this regard. It really was at the urging of committee that we decided to look at new approaches to be able to provide the service on the land. I appreciate the committee's support, specifically Members Yakeleya and Lafferty who indicated, really, interest in trying some initiatives in their regions. We recognized that we were having a problem both finding inmates who wanted or were eligible to go to any of these wilderness camps to serve part of their sentence. At the same time, we had fewer and fewer operators willing to provide the service and engage in really what amounted to a business. So we looked at some of the shortcomings and pitfalls and recognized I think, through discussion with Members, that we had to come up with a more streamlined model, a simple model, something that really focussed on the basics. That is about getting back on the land, serving part of your sentence out on the land, doing some healing, but maybe, more importantly, making reparations to the community.
One of our thoughts was that providing meat and doing some hunting for those who may not be able to hunt in communities might be a very useful service and something to be appreciated by communities. So instead of providing a lot of the complex counselling and insisting that the camp operator had to be both a counsellor, a business operator, a jack-of-all-trades, we wanted to see if we couldn't come up with a more successful model by working with some elders, by bringing out one or two people at a time, no more than that, in a very simple setup on the land with tents and rudimentary equipment. This really is about getting back to basics and get back to traditional ways of traditional practices.
So I am happy to say in the two regions, the Tlicho and Sahtu, we are moving ahead. It's a little more quickly in the Sahtu right now. We are in negotiations with an elder. We are hoping very shortly to have some eligible inmates out on the land and then after we are able to conduct this, I have indicated to Members that I will do a review of these pilots, but we're very close now. I understand it's now next steps for me to sit down with the Member, Madam Chair, and understand what the operator is looking for and some of our challenges and some of our accountability issues that we have to ensure are looked after, but I think we're very close. It's down to the short strokes now, Madam Chair, and I think we'll be on the land fairly soon. Thank you.