Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a very similar line of questioning as my colleagues, maybe just to clear something up that the Minister has brought open here in the House that felt that this would not be a problem with me. I had indicated that I was optimistic about this, but once we took a more detailed look at it, it was not something that I too am comfortable with. I see this as a fairly simple process, actually. I want to talk first about child and family services committees that our Standing Committee on Social Programs talked about. That was the establishment of five more communities that would go into the business plan for 2011-12. When we got together, the question was the cost. I don’t believe the cost of establishing these committees at the cost that was provided to us by the Minister. We are looking at this. It seems like we have done a whole bunch of work as a committee. We travelled around the communities and we got some recommendations that we thought were going to make a difference. There was obviously an issue with this whole system and the way the child and family services was being run. That is why there were so many kids in care and there are kids in the wrong cultural not in their home, basically not in their home communities, not in culturally that is foster homes. Many of them are good foster homes. I am not putting down the foster homes, but many of them are issues. We heard right across the Territories and all the small communities that didn’t like the idea of kids going into foster care and then being removed from the community and so on.

We provided options in recommendations in the report, one of them being child and family services committees. I thought the department would look at that, take a look at the five communities that had the highest apprehensions and then take that money instead of having the kids in foster care and develop committees, not balloon the costs for each

committee and then provide it back to us and say you can’t do anything with it. That is not something we had expected. We thought that these were good recommendations that came that we thought would improve things over the long run. If we are not going to do anything, then why didn’t we just learn that at the very beginning?

We have to make recommendations. We went through the review. We are making recommendations. If the department doesn’t want to do the key issues that we felt were going to resolve some of the longstanding issues with the total area of child protection, the whole child and family services, then we should have been told that right off the bat.

It is no use doing the review because we don’t have the money to do it. We know the health budgets were tight. These were recommendations where we felt that money could be moved into other areas that would be lessened by these actions, by creating committees in communities where there are the highest apprehensions that would be the cost of foster care would go down. Then we run these committees and now attempt this and then do the early intervention. That is the same thing. If we are going to add, and we didn’t ask to add the two more healthy family programs, we asked for early intervention and we asked for prevention. There could be all kinds of things involved in that. Now it’s a good idea to expand the Healthy Families. We thought that that was a good program. There are two more in expansion. I don’t recall us saying that we would go into Fort Resolution or Lutselk’e with the committee. If the department felt that this was feasible to go into the regional centres because the regional centres are the bigger communities and the bigger communities are where the higher birth rates are and the Healthy Families go from the time there is a pregnancy up until, I forget the age, but I think something around preschool and then they work with these families. We’re in communities where there are higher birthrates, then we’re probably hitting a majority of the communities and then the prevention in the long run again pays money down the road on having healthier families and you don’t have so many issues later on and these groups are actually working with the families. To me it seems like we should be looking at this area, that’s why we’ve gone back to 8-29. Look at that budget and figure out how we can do this. Then let’s take another look at the numbers. Has the department take another look at the numbers. These numbers here seem to be very high. Why would we need $125,000 to train a child protection worker in each community where we’re trying to set up a committee? Why?

Anyway, I’d like the Minister to respond to some of that.