The Member must not be aware of some of the programming that we do offer, and we do offer a number of on-the-land programs. There’s a program in Fort Good Hope that we utilize to place inmates over the last couple of years and there are other programs that we utilize as well.

As far as changing my stripes, I don’t believe that’s the case. I am still interested in prudently managing finances in a responsible way and that’s what we’re talking about here. We know we’ve got facilities where the count goes up and down. We’ve got high count, we’ve got low count. Mostly we’ve got high count. Most of our facilities are full to capacity, often overcapacity. We’ve got a youth facility that has one female offender in it, but it’s got a number of male offenders in it and that number changes in our youth facility on a fairly regular basis. In fact, our count changes daily.

Spending money to do a cost analysis as to whether or not sending some of our inmates south doesn’t seem like a prudent use of our money here in the Northwest Territories. I would rather spend that money on more of our community programming. I would rather spend the money on some of the lands programming than do a cost analysis about sending somebody south. If we were to send, say, our one female offender south when we do have a place to put her here, she would not benefit from the programming that is designed for Northerners that the male offenders in the same facility have access to. So we would be actually doing that person a disadvantage.

I think our mandate is a good mandate for supporting Northerners in our northern facilities. I am not particularly interested at this time spending a whole lot of money to do a cost-benefit analysis as to whether or not sending our people south is in the best interest of the people, the department or our bank account.