Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’d like to speak a bit to the issue of reducing the court workers in the four communities. The Minister stated that he’s trying to cut costs, and I’m all for cutting costs, but I think there’s a couple of things that haven’t been considered in light of this particular reduction.
It’s been mentioned by the Member for Nunakput that the court worker in his community — and I suspect it happens in other communities as well — does a great deal more than just take legal aid applications. I think there was a recommendation from the Social Programs Committee that Justice consider looking at these particular jobs, the legal aid or the court worker jobs, and re-profiling them, expanding the duties of the court worker job to include other things, such as working for the Community Justice committee. There’s any number of items within a community that the court worker could assist with. It has also been mentioned by the Member for Nunakput that there’s an amount of travel involved and various other and sundry tasks they do.
I’d like to ask the Minister if there was any analysis done prior to the decision to cut these four court worker positions, other than analyzing the number of legal aid applications they take in a year and the number of courts they attend in a year. Was there an analysis of any other work that these particular workers do, such as travel and assisting clients to court, et cetera?