Thank you, Madam Chair. A couple of things in the Minister's opening remarks that are all worthy of consideration, Madam Chair, but a couple that stand out to me are when Minister Bell told us that this year, six new RCMP positions will be created in the NWT in addition to the 22 that we have seen added in communities in the past three years. So I am very pleased to see that we are putting the money into it.
I also know, Madam Chair, from conversations and meetings with the RCMP here at the Yellowknife detachment in "G" division, that they are working at changing some of their approaches, the way they are doing business, and I am seeing evidence of this. It's positive evidence, Madam Chair, especially in community relations in the openness and the invitation from the RCMP for citizens to come forward and let them know what they see, what they think, what they want in terms of their own neighbourhood policing.
To the creation of a committee in Yellowknife, a citizens' committee, non-political. There are no MLAs on it, no city councillors. It is made up of citizens, people in the business community, some NGOs. This is the kind of thing I see as very positive and deserves every support that the department can give.
Madam Chair, something else that stood out was a description from Minister Bell that our court system is experiencing tremendous pressure and growth. This is not the kind of growth that we want to see, Madam Chair. He told us yesterday that the Supreme Court had 113 sitting days in communities outside of Yellowknife, three times the number of days this court has sat in communities in just one year; triple. In Yellowknife here, courtroom use has doubled in the last five years. So I won't, at your request, Madam Chair, beg for detail on that, but at some point in the budget discussion, I will be looking for some sense of what is driving this, what seems to be, extraordinary growth in our court sitting days.
Madam Chair, on a broader basis, something that has always intrigued me, and interested me, are alternatives to the court system. We have, over a number of years -- this is nothing new in the NWT -- instituted new levels of an approach to alternative sentencing, to ideas about restorative justice, to the idea of diversion where enforcement officers may have some discretion of diverting or directing, especially a young offender or a new offender, Madam Chair, to community justice committees, as a way of getting their case, or their problem, or their difficulty heard at a community level among the peers, rather than in a court system which is foreign. It doesn't have much relevance in some ways. It is the law of the land, but in terms of delivering justice and curbing or avoiding repeat offences, I see so much more potential in these alternatives.
We have dispute resolution pilot projects, I believe, in our court system, especially in the area of family law. These are the things that I really would like to see continuing emphasis, resources and priority on. It's something I think we can do a better job of, we can be progressive. We can make a difference in the number of people in our court system, serving in our jails. Investing more authority and responsibility for managing crime in communities. This is not easy, but it is something that has shown results and can show more results if we give it the emphasis that I believe it deserves.
Madam Chair, that concludes my opening comments and I look forward to detail.