Mr. Chairman, I will use my riding, for instance. There are 33 children in care in my riding. It is costing this government $488,000 for 33 children. That is a lot of money to have kids basically in foster care in my riding. I take offense because I know a lot of these children and their families. It breaks my heart to realize that the families all mean well, but just because they are poor and on income support and basically they don’t an education degree or they are unemployed, makes them bad parents. A lot of it has to do with substance abuse and basically the problems that we see in our communities from being and trying to break that trend. I think we are better off taking that $488,000, give it to the Tl’oondih Healing Society and let them run family programs so that the families, the parents, the children, the grandparents, the siblings can go to a program where they work out their problems for $488,000. That is more an investment and getting a better return on investment than having these kids in care year after year after year. I think, for myself, that is where we should be going in preventing this problem from getting worse and trying to find ways to deal with the outrageous cost of $7.6 million in which a lot of that investment could be made on the families and trying to work this out internally in our communities with the family members and with the resource people we have in our communities than spending $488,000 for 33 children in care in the riding that I represent. We have to look at alternatives to break down this problem and I think

we have to do something different than what we are trying to do today.

It’s a lot of money we are spending in this area and I think that’s something that I feel very strongly about, but I think you will see a difference in the end if we do have such a program dealing with resolving family issues than simply continuing to run through the court system, apprehending children, the cost of the courts and the cost of our social workers, the cost to the communities, the cost to the parents. This is becoming an industry regarding what the residential school was. Again, I make the point that you are probably better off investing that money by way of developing family recovery programs than continuing to expend this type of money. So has the Minister ever thought of developing those programs and investing in family recovery programs versus continuing to keep these children in foster care?