Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t want to cover a lot of the ground. I agree with what my colleagues Mr. Bromley and Mr. Abernethy are saying.
I’ve been here for just over four years, and I’ve seen the North Slave Correctional Centre go into the new building. I’ve had many discussions with the former Minister about the new approach to corrections: how it was going to be holistic, more healing, and how they were going to do some good things there.
I share the concerns of my colleagues that the program delivery officers are being taken out of the sexual offender and family violence programming. That causes me some concern. I listened to the deputy minister’s rationale and how the programs will be delivered, but you just have to question whether the frequency, the reliability, will still be there if the programming gets left to case workers and the psychologists, or whoever is going to be delivering the program.
I think there is going to be an impact on the frequency and reliability of the delivery of those programs. I’m not sure why we would, in our largest correctional facility in the territory, want to go to a
model that’s followed by some of our smaller facilities.
Again, I know the department was up against the wall in terms of reductions. If you look at the reductions, they’re obviously not going to touch the security side of things in corrections. It would be almost impossible to look for reductions there, so programming is the obvious soft spot, I could say, and an area where they could look at reductions. I don’t agree with the reductions on the program delivery officers. I think it’s a step backwards.
I’d like to find out a little bit more about the program Ms. Schofield talked about — the federal funding — and where it looks like we’ve applied for federal funding for the YO facility. I’m wondering if we’ve applied for federal funding under that same program for the adult facility.