Thank you, Mr. Chairman. For clarity, the training isn’t about training one worker per community. It is training all the workers in the community to work with that, not only the community child and family services committee, but it also is around building community capacity,
working with the leadership in that community, changing the way the community treats children, changing the way we as a community treat children that either are in jeopardy of harm or require intervention.
For clarity, I have done presentations in communities on child and family services committees. I have worked with communities around developing these committees. That takes a tremendous amount of care and feeding of those committees to continue that progress. People drop out when they feel that they are not quite suited for it, when the community is not quite ready. It is about developing communities to be able to step up and take this forward.
The $125,000 is a number worth shaking heads at and looking at, but when we bring people in for training, we have to bear all the transportation costs, all the replacement costs, all the training material cost as well as changing practice. So it is not just a matter of bringing someone in and saying you will do this differently tomorrow. It is around building that capacity in the worker to do it differently.
As was referenced earlier, this is the only jurisdiction that has this type of system. So even though workers may work somewhere else or be trained at whatever university or come from a community, the practice to date has not been working with children within a child and family services committee. That is why the expensive training. The training is one time and we move on and that training will be ongoing as we move to different regions and different communities, but it is a one start-up cost. We have to remember that start-up costs for any type of changing behaviour, changing activities in a community is expensive. It is worth the investment.