Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m really pleased to be able to make some remarks with regard to the Child and Family Services Act Review committee report. It was very exciting to me to be part of this process and I think that the end result is a very valid one and I think it’s an excellent, excellent result.

It was a year, pretty much, from start to finish for the motion to get through the House until we submitted the report. It was almost exactly a year and it was an exhaustive process, it was a very comprehensive process and I think the end result shows that it was well worth the efforts on behalf of everybody involved.

I echo the comments that have already been made by committee members to thank the people who had a hand in assisting us with the report, making all our travel arrangements, making our room and our meeting arrangements, helping us within the communities, setting up meetings for us within the communities. The staff certainly did a huge amount of work relative to the report. Last, but not least, the people who did come to all of our meetings, all of our focus groups who provided us with their input. It was extremely valuable.

My belief, and I think it was pretty much confirmed by the people that we met with, is that the act itself is pretty good. There are not a lot of major changes required to the act, but there are a fair number of changes that are required in the implementation of the act and that, from what we heard from the people that we met with, is basically the problem. The implementation of the act needs fixing.

In particular what struck me, and I have to say it’s interesting that I can listen to other members of the committee and their comments on the report and we all have a different approach, each one of us, to how we are commenting on this report and it’s wonderful that we all heard the same thing. We went to the same places, we worked on the same project, but we obviously are coming at it from different perspectives and that’s a very good thing. What struck me particularly from I would say every one of our meetings and with stakeholders and with individuals in communities, and also in our discussions in committee, what struck me probably the most is the need that was expressed to keep children at home either with their parents or with an extended family member. Removing the kids from the community was seen as an absolute huge difficulty and it was one thing which I would say, if anything comes out of this report, we need to make huge efforts to keep kids within the community. The recommendations from the report reflect the need to keep children within their family, within their home, within their community.

The thing that is necessary, though, if we do that, if we keep the children in the community, we have to then provide adequate supports to either the parents, the child and family services committee within the communities, to extended family members if they’re caring for the kids. There is a lack of supports within the communities that does not allow for adequate implementation of the act and it creates a lot of problems. If we remove a child from the parents and require the parents to

undergo some sort of counselling, is that counselling available within that community? In most cases no. That’s the sort of thing that we have to do. If we’re going to provide supports, we need to make sure if we’re going to keep kids at home and in the community we then have to provide supports to the parents and the families in the community.

We also heard a great deal about a very large hole in the act, and that’s the lack of services for children between ages 16 and 18. That gap was identified a number of times. I think it’s one that was evident before we ever started this review, but it’s one that absolutely must be filled. We have any number of children who are left without any kind of services because they happen to be between the ages of 16 and 18.

The report has many recommendations which are directed towards the administration of the act, basically what’s being done at the department level and by the GNWT personnel. Like my colleagues, in terms of front-line staff, I absolutely wish to commend the work that they do. It is a very difficult job, it’s certainly not one that I could do and I’m grateful that there are people out there that can do jobs that I don’t feel I can do, and this is one of them. They do a great job, but they don’t necessarily have the services and the policies that allow them to do the job that the communities want them to do. So, many of the recommendations relative to administration of the act are geared to try and make the job of a social worker easier, more efficient and that then makes less apprehensions and makes it less difficult on families.

It’s been mentioned already, but I want to also say that the recommendations emphasize that there’s changes needed in the kinds of measures that we use to deliver social services, and particularly in light of child apprehensions. We tend to, at the moment, work against families, and the underlying principle has to be to work with families, not against them. So the recommendations talk about advocacy, they talk about collaborative processes and it’s a different way of thinking. There’s not a lot of basic structural change required, but it’s a different way of thinking and instead of being adversarial -- I think that word was mentioned already -- if we don’t start from an adversarial position, we start from a collaborative position. If we can do that, it’s going to solve the problem before it gets to be a bigger problem or before it gets to court.

We certainly heard a great deal about child and family services committees, mostly that people didn’t know that they had the opportunity to establish them. When we mentioned them, I would say, to a community, they believed that that was the right way to go. In my mind, establishing those committees is going to be key to putting into place the recommendations that we have made in the

report. I firmly believe that we need to give power to the communities, to the people in the communities. They know best what works for their people in the community and for their community as a whole. At the moment we’re not doing that. We say that we’re listening to them, but I don’t believe we really are. If we can give that sort of power and interaction with people and families to members of a community, I think it’s certainly going to improve, it’s going to reduce the number of child apprehensions, I believe that absolutely, and it will solve problems before they become a problem, which, again, is going to reduce apprehensions. The other thing that these committees can do is they can require, they can advocate, they can get the supports that are so necessary in the community to help families.

In conclusion, I would like to say that it could be said that this report was a labour of love on behalf of the committee members. We were all extremely, I would think, I shouldn’t speak for my other committee members, but I believe that we certainly were committed to this work and we felt it was very important. I think we also believe that it was well worth the effort and that the product that resulted was certainly a good one.

I have heard from committee members today and Mr. Menicoche, I appreciate his comments, but I really look forward to hearing from other Members of the House on their comments, from other Members outside of the committee, their view of this report and its recommendations. There’s a number of recommendations that were made not just to the Department of Health and Social Services but a number of other government departments and we spent a lot of time discussing whether or not we should put those in and felt very strongly that the recommendations affected other departments but it, therefore, needed to be included because they have an impact on child and family services.

It is a great report. I encourage other Members to give comments, I encourage the public to give us comments on this report. I think we would like to hear whatever comments are out there, good, better or indifferent. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.