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.