Thank you, Mr. Chair. On getting the assignment of the Department of Justice, one of the first things we did was sit down and talk about some priorities and some political priorities and areas that we thought we could make some headway. One of the most important things for me was to add policing in the Northwest Territories. I think we have done that with 28 additional bodies in the last three years. We also looked at, most importantly, policing in our smaller communities and the way that the operations were set up to serve our smallest communities. It was readily apparent, from talking to Members, that what we needed was a permanent presence in our smaller communities. We had 13 without police detachments. We will be down to 12 with the addition of Sachs Harbour, but we set out a course or a plan that would see, my hope was to go from 13 communities without detachments to 10 before the end of this government. We have been successful with Sachs Harbour. We made the argument to the federal government, to the Minister of Justice. We were very well aware that there were sovereignty arguments for having viable, sustainable communities in the High Arctic. I was very concerned about the response time in Sachs Harbour. If something goes wrong, two hours is a very long time. That is if there is good weather. Thankfully, we had some very good response on behalf of the RCMP in some critical situations in Sachs Harbour, but that was the case we made for Sachs Harbour and its detachment. The federal government was listening.
The RCMP has worked very closely with us. We talked with them about their operational priorities. I did meet in the summer with Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and laid out the case for Sachs Harbour. I am happy to say that we were successful. I have since gone back now to the same Minister again, Mr. Chair, and made the case for more detachments. I think they are a little bit amazed and bemused that, after getting one, we have come back for more, but we have done that. I can tell Members that we have a plan. We will be discussing it in the next couple of weeks for Gameti and for Wrigley, which are two very high pressure points in the system. We know the winter road experiment in Gameti. We saw the need first-hand. We spoke with the leadership and elders. That is a community that has been in desperate need of a permanent policing presence for a long time. I think we are going to deliver there. The same case can be made for Wrigley, especially with the coming pipeline development. We need to do something about a
detachment there. There are other communities that we will move on to after that, Mr. Chair, but very much I want to work on delivering on these three detachments before our time is up here as a government. As I say, in the next couple of weeks we will be sitting down to discuss a plan with Members.