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.