Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We do continue to work with Fort McPherson to set up that committee there and part of what I would like to see happen there is to have less children in care in McPherson. I agree with the Member that Fort McPherson has one of the highest number of children in care. So that is a long-term goal and we will continue to do that. I want to make that clear.

We will continue to work on setting up more children and family services committees.

In the communication I had when I met with the committee on the recommendations of the CFSA review it was made clear to me that you wanted immediate action and a lot more aggressive strategy to do that. This is why I’ve said, when we reviewed how do we jump start and get ahead on what we’ve been doing until now, the missing variable is we need to resource this.

I think we should be careful when we speak about children in care, because there are lots of children who are in care who are there because they were neglected or they were sexually abused. They are suffering. While we can talk about preventing and helping families so that children don’t get to that neglect and abuse, the fact of the matter is a lot of children in our care have been abused and neglected.

The long-term work of children and family service committees is to have a community presence, a committee of leaders and concerned citizens who are supported and resourced and who will take on the task of working with families, helping them, working with child protection workers, working with health and social services, working with any other people in the community so that the families are supported, children are supported so that they don’t get into the system. This will take a lot of concerted effort.

Mr. Chairman, I want to say I am committed to doing that. I think Fort McPherson has the best chance of getting ahead of this than any other community, but to do it with five committees, because so far we’ve been relying on our staff and management in the authorities to do it as part of their work. I think we need to create a position that’s tasked to doing this or else it’s not going to happen as quickly and as well as the committee wanted it to happen. Thank you.