Thank you, Mr. Braden. Next on the list for general comments is Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Although most of the subjects have been touched on, I am just going to be breeze through them really quickly. I am happy to see six new RCMP positions being created in addition to the 22 that have already been established. I am hoping, on a personal level, that this is addressing the concerns that were brought up in the report of needs. I think it was coined by Terry...Now I can't remember the officer's name, but we had an RCMP report establishing basic needs that they needed to do to provide clear services and solid services to the public. It mentioned where they needed the creation of a whole new bunch of positions. I would like to hear later on about the details. Are we meeting the needs that the RCMP have said to ensure that basic policing services are out there, and we are covering the need in a safe way?

The next thing is legal aid services. I appreciate that the Minister has mentioned here that we have $4 million for legal aid services. I am hoping we will get some detail on what type of backlog and wait times we have on this. I am going to propose some new ideas. If the Minister has an appetite to consider options; for example, creating a territorial service agreement with Nunavut and the Yukon. I am not a lawyer or have that type of experience, but maybe the Minister or his staff can express the details of how difficult it would be to create some type of service

agreement with the other two territories, recognizing that our lay of the land is not much different in the essence of the peoples and the type of community justice that may need to be provided. Quite often backlogs are because we can't get a lawyer due to the conflict problem and the relationship with them. Then we are forced to shelve those family law cases until we can find someone in the private sector to pick it up, or even potentially go to the private sector down south. I am going to propose ideas like that; start thinking outside the box because if we can't get local lawyers to do that, we are going to have to look elsewhere. It's quite often that we could extend this type of territorial service agreement to maybe even work with justices across the Territories. We are thinking far beyond our small little area and saying maybe we could work on a territorial level. I recognize that laws in the Yukon are different and laws in Nunavut are different but, at the end of the day, lawyers can practice anywhere across Canada, assuming they met the bar requirements. Why don't we look at options of making sure we can certify justices to do the same, so we can deliver on a regular basis fairer justice in a timely way? I just hate to think people are waiting for justice and can't get lawyers. I certainly hate to think of people waiting for justice to be served and we can't provide them a judge to see their case.

Other areas I would potentially like to hear more detail on, speaking of justices, the Minister had mentioned 113 days the Supreme Court had sittings outside of Yellowknife. As I understand it, there are three Supreme Court justices and that works out to approximately 38 days each judge. I will be curious as to the details how often they sit in Yellowknife, just so we can get a bigger picture on how much they do and what the territorial justices do. On the Supreme Court point, I have always wondered who pays for that appointment when the federal government decides which judge we are getting, and how do we signal when the workload requires another judge, or how do we decide we do not need another judge. I am curious on the type of workload associated with that.

Madam Chair, I think that gives an extremely high level point of view of some of the areas that I think I will be raising when we get to those specific pages. I will look forward to those detailed answers. I know the Minister and his staff are writing these things down, but I will ask them in such a way that will give them a fair chance to comment in the detailed way I am looking for. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Next on the list for general comments is Mr. Villeneuve.

Thank you, Madam Chair. A lot of my concerns were also brought up by other Members, so I won't repeat what they stated in their general comments. With some of the main areas that the Minister had mentioned in his opening statement, with regard to services to government that our legal advisors give to various government departments, I also have more questions than comments. I know the Government of the NWT employs a large number of its own lawyers to look at drafting legislation and providing legal advice. I think we should revisit the contracts policy also of the GNWT. I know that the government also contracts out a lot of legal services to be provided to the GNWT that I think we could do just as well in house as any other contracted firm can do. I think if we task the government to do a lot of those things in house, I am sure they could find the resources to carry out a lot of those functions that we pay in contract fees.

To the law enforcement, it's good to see new positions being created. I would have liked to see more emphasis put into continuing on with the aboriginal recruitment program that the RCMP were doing for the last couple of years, with not much uptake, but I am sure with the new graduates and our kids going through high school, we could have maybe...That is something that I think should have been ongoing for the next five years to get more of an aboriginal presence in the law enforcement field.

With respect to legal aid, that's another department that's severely backlogged with the number of lawyers that are in legal aid services. I know that the issues of family law are usually the ones that are put on the backburner, the real complex issues I guess that people are dealing with and trying to get legal aid for some family law decisions that people have been waiting years and years to deal with with no progress being made to resolving their family issues.

With community justice, the wilderness camps culture program is a great thing. It works in a lot of communities and I know that the community justice needs vary in community to community, and I hope that the government allocates the funding that supports community justice needs and is not a funding arrangement where each community is allotted a certain amount of money to deal with their community justice because it would be unfair to have a community divert justice funding because they just don't have the need to spend all that justice money. Money just gets held up where in communities where there's a lot of criminal activity and the community justice committees are busy and they take on a real large caseload. I hope that the funding arrangements are based on historical caseloads that each community is dealing with. That would help make it more of a balanced program, I think.

One final thing with the Supreme Court rotations outside of Yellowknife. I don't think it's really something that's that contentious, given the fact that if we did fly in all of the people that the Supreme Court is dealing with to Yellowknife to deal with their court cases, I think the costs would be much higher than what we're experiencing today with just the Supreme Courts doing their circuits. So I think it's good to get the Supreme Court out there to the communities so the community people can see who are their justices and who are their courts, who are the judges and who are the lawyers that are all in the Supreme Court department.

Three times the number of days the court sat in communities the previous year, I think that's all relative based on the work that they have to do anyway, and more people aren't just going to court these days and pleading guilty and I think that's something that's of the past and people just don't take that easy route out anymore and just do their time, which is usually the case that legal aid gives everybody, you know, just plead guilty and it will be done. I think people are taking a different approach in dealing with their justice issues and taking it to a higher court to get a fair outcome.

I agree with one of my colleagues that there should be more training to JPs and other justice committee members and workshops in the communities so that the

communities are able to deal with a lot of the justice issues that may be just too cumbersome for the higher courts to really waste any time on.

For the proposed new funding of $1.4 million for training and staffing levels at the NWT corrections centres is a good thing, also. I really see the need to train the staff and the corrections officers. I would even like to see more training going into just the RCMP division also to get some more intercultural training along those lines that the guards and corrections staff have to deal with. Other than that, I know Justice is a big portfolio, especially here in the NWT where crime rates really fluctuate and spike from one year to the next. It's always a hard read to figure out what impacts pipelines and mines and exploration development have on the NWT and in communities. Some communities have real drastic changes in criminal activity, where some really know how to deal with it. For instance, Fort Good Hope with the drug dealer there where they just expelled him from the community. A real quick and simple solution like that sometimes work just as well as adding a new police officer or something.

I hope the Justice department really takes into consideration a lot of the community feedback into justice requirements and how they deal with their justice in the traditional ways versus the conventional way. But I look forward to also getting into some new detail so we can get more in depth into where this department is actually headed. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Villeneuve. Department of Justice, general comments. Any further general comments? Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to keep it brief. I have some questions for the Minister and his staff also in Justice. I want to ask the Minister, but I'll ask later on in the detail. My comments will be around the impacts of justice in our region, especially for my communities that I represent in the Sahtu region is that we need to have some discussion around having a presence of the regional justice office in our region. Right now they deal with the community of Yellowknife, I'm not too sure how the process works, but we seem to be going outside our region to get some direction. I think it's possibly from Inuvik or Yellowknife. There's no presence of a regional justice superintendent in the Sahtu region to deal effectively with the issues that we have to deal with. So I want to pursue this idea sometime in the future in terms of having some presence of a regional justice office in the Sahtu region. There's going to be an increase of activity and there's already an increase of activity in our region through the oil and gas exploration work and there's going to possibly be some more work done if the Mackenzie gas project comes through. If we could have some form of presence in our region from the Justice department for people to deal with concerns and questions. There's no single point right now in the Sahtu.

Communities that I represent are taking on more responsibilities of administration of justice through the justice committees, and this is where we can really see the benefits of having a regional justice office, superintendent or person in our region to deal with these justice initiatives that are being promoted by this department and myself, also. Right now, it's a concern for us. So I wanted to make that as a general comment, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair, I want to talk about the initiatives that the Minister is pursuing. I fully support him on the out of the box type of innovative solutions to look at how to deal with the issue of bringing people back to the land through the wilderness corrections camp program. It would be very beneficial. I think sometimes we need to just think in ways that would work for our region. It may be different in a southern region or in a northern region, but it's something that's done for our region that makes sense for our people there and I think sometimes we get lost and a blanket follows you. You know, everything has to be the same and it doesn't quite fit. So I want to encourage the Minister to continue having these type of discussions and see where it fits really well with our people in the region.

The other one I want to talk to him about is with the court system in terms of the type of programs that maybe could be explored in using the Dene language as the first place of language in the court system. Right now I'm not too sure what type of plans are in place to have language translation in our court system, or do we just pick the language translation in our court system, or do we just pick the translators or the interpreters when the court system comes into the community? Sometimes they're honoured, but they're not too comfortable in terms of some of the words that the lawyers are using. So they try to find a way to use that type of language through our aboriginal languages and they have a hard time because they don't have the proper training. So that's something we could look at, because our language is totally different from the English language and some things that don't make sense in English, in our own language make sense. So there's quite a difference of the world views in terms of the administration of justice and how it's being interpreted into our own language, and so there's different philosophies and that. I'm not too sure how the language aspect part of training is being implemented into our justice system.

I wanted to say some more about the courts, but again, Madam Chair, I'm going to leave it until the detail. I look forward to seeing some form of solution to policing in small aboriginal communities. Mainly that's what we talked about with the policing services. Myself, along with Mr. Pokiak and other Members here talked about our communities that do not have any policing. There's a solution to look at providing services to those communities. I'm not too sure how that's going to roll out, but I'll wait until the Minister provides further details on that issue.

I want to thank the Minister for his time and working on some initiatives. I know it's tough. I know his department has lots of work ahead of them. So I want to leave that until we get into details, Madam Chair. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Next for general comments I have Mr. Pokiak.

Thank you, Madam Chair. A lot of my colleagues already indicated some of the questions I will be asking later, I guess, in detail. There are just a couple of little things I'd like to find out from the department in regard to services to government. I'd be interested to find out what do they actually do to improve support to families in court in conflict. Also, what have they done to prepare for the impacts of resource development since last year?

It's interesting. The department is looking at six new RCMP positions this coming year. I have a feeling about

where they're going to go, but I'll ask the Minister later on anyway exactly where these six people will be located.

These are just some of the general comments I'd like to make. The last one, Madam Chair, is that I don't know where I can add this into it, but it probably has to do with the NWT court facility. The people in my riding are still not happy with the proposed Yellowknife courthouse. Once we get to the main estimates, I'll probably raise it up anyway. So it will be brought forward. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Pokiak. General comments. Any further general comments? We're ready for detail. Then I would ask Members if they would please turn to page 7-10, information item, revenue summary. Any questions?

Agreed. Thank you, 7-13, activity summary, services to government, operations expenditure summary, $8.589 million. Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'd like to ask the question that I mentioned in my opening comments. That was getting back to legal services. I'm just wondering if the Minister could tell us whether or not today the backlog of cases in family law is more or less than it was prior to the government embarking on opening the new Family Law Clinic in downtown Yellowknife? So I'd just like to ask that question. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. I believe that legal aid services is covered off further on, under 7-23. I think there's a distinction between legal services and legal aid. I'll let the Minister proceed with that answer if he'd like. But for the other Members who may be constantly asking questions about legal aid services, that's on page 7-23. Mr. Bell.

Thank you, Madam Chair. You are correct, but I'll answer the question. My understanding was that prior to the new Family Law Clinic in Yellowknife, there were 133 people on the wait list. The last numbers I have, end of January, in the neighbourhood of 80. So there has been some marked improvement in that area. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. Anything further under services to government? Mr. Braden.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Justice, as described in this area here, provides services to government, including finance, legal services and legislative drafting and this kind of thing. We're looking at, as you said, Madam Chair, about $8.5 million. I was wondering if we sort of take the overall requirement of our government for legal services. Does the department provide 100 percent of what our government as a whole needs, or is it half? What's the ratio here? If we're talking about $8.5 million in blanket legal services, what portion of the total government need is satisfied by this appropriation, Madam Chair?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Bell.

Madam Chair, in the sum $2.2 million that we have in that area of legal services, most of that work is provided in house for the government. If there are specific areas of expertise that we require specialized legal help, say taxation, we do frequently go out of house. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. Mr. Braden.

Madam Chair, I'm taking it that the requirement of another department, for instance taxation and Finance or something, that they would have the discretion to go out and find that service on their own. I guess I'm wondering whether the Minister could give me some sense what would the entire legal bill be for the GNWT. Does he have any sense of that? I'm just trying to look at it here for if we're allocating $8.5 million, how much additional legal services do we buy across the board in our Government of the Northwest Territories, Madam Chair?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Bell.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Contracts for the provision of legal services have to come through the Department of Justice. So if the Department of Finance wants some legal work done and they want a contract and want to see somebody contracted, we handle that for them. They would pay for it, but you wouldn't see a budget line item in their mains that would be specific to that. So in order for us to pull together the entire legal bill, if you would, for the government as a whole on any given year, we'd have to go out and talk to the various departments and see what their needs had been on a year-to-year basis. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. Mr. Braden.

Thanks for the information, Madam Chair. I will not ask for that as a commitment. That sounds like a pretty big piece of work. I'll just conclude my questions on this page now. Thank you.