Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to thank the Minister for being with us this afternoon and his staff, as well. I don't have much in terms of general comments, more questions than anything.
This is more of a government-wide thing and I know that it's not the Minister's doing so much, but when it comes to reductions, I have heard other Members speak about this during our budget process here, and the fact that the government was forced to cut $30 million, $10 million this year, from its budget without any type of input by Regular Members. The $200,000 that is coming out of community policing that gets back to the bigger picture. AOC should have been informed of the reductions and had some input on the reductions. I know Mr. Yakeleya was speaking about reductions on aboriginal wellness in Health having been reduced. We just did not have a chance to have any input whatsoever on reductions. The same holds true with the Department of Justice. Social Programs or any other Regular Member, for that matter, didn't have any input on where these reductions were going to come from. Now after the dust has settled, we are left trying to defend or support reductions. I think there is a better way to do it, and that would be to consult Regular Members early on in the reduction process, so we have some kind of idea what's going on and what we are going to be faced with, so there are no surprises.
Having said that, I will give the Minister a heads up on this; I do have questions with regard to legal aid services, the new legal aid Family Law Clinic that was opened in Yellowknife. I would really like to see if it has decreased the amount of time clients have to wait to get their cases settled. I don't know what type of performance measurement indicators we might have in place to see the
wait times reduced to get some closure on family law issues.
The other thing I wanted to talk about today, under the new format -- I won't ask questions right now -- I will have a number of questions. I know the Minister mentioned the delay that's happening with the human resource report in the corrections services. I have a number of questions there about why the delays are taking place, what the status of some of the recommendations are. Some of them were pretty important recommendations and I wouldn't want to see them delayed much more.
The actual human resource plan was initially supposed to be completed in March of last year. It's been pushed to March 31st of this year and I am just wondering if that target will be met. There are a number of things, and I will have questions for the Minister on that at the appropriate time during detail.
A good news story is I haven't heard many issues coming out of the corrections services as I have had in the past. So things are getting, it would seem, better there. There have been a number of changes that have happened, but it's important that the plan is followed up on and followed through. I will have questions at the appropriate time. Thank you.