Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to just remind the Member, who is standing committee chair, that I agree with him and I said that in my letter on February 25
th
that the
prevention, and I quote, “the prevention oriented recommendations of Standing Committee on Social Programs will, in the long-term, have a positive effect on these expenditures.” I agree with him. The standing committee review of the CFSA and those recommendations about prevention and increasing child and service committees and doing more of that work, I agree with him that that is a positive step and I’ve said that.
Now the issue here is that the committee is saying that you should expand this program now and you should do that by finding savings from within because prevention will save money. I think that ignores the staggering effect it has in prevention work and what’s already there, because we already have children in foster care and if you were to take this money out of that $12 million, the money that is allocated to kids in foster care and the families that are taking care of them, we have kids in Trailcross, we have kids in residential care, we have kids in care and we have to pay for them this year.
So if you’re going to take any of that out of there, I don’t have money to take out of there so that I can create the children and family services committees this year. That’s what I’m telling you. I agree with you; in the long run that is the right way to go. So children and family services committees, we have worked on this for the last 10 years because the legislation provides for that, but no Legislature has ever approved money for it. So coming forward in the next business plan, this will be the first time when we will actually go to business planning and ask for money, but we need to do it properly. To have children and family services committees to work, most people that want to sit on it would like to be paid to do that. They also want to be trained to see what the Child and Family Services Act says, in how do you intervene. If you want to bring elders and community people together to do this important work, then they need to be properly supported and trained just like community justice committees.
The reason why that succeeded, and I worked in Justice when that came up in the ‘90s, they were very well supported. They had a coordinator headquartered in Yellowknife, they had regional coordinators, there were staff, there were people like Nick Sibbeston who chose to work there. That was done properly.
So I’m saying you can’t say just because you want prevention now to take the money from people that are already in the hospital sick so that you can do prevention. I think that’s the right way to go and what I’m saying is the business plan said that we
will work on increasing five committees. We will continue to do that, but the letter that I had was that the committee report wanted us to get really aggressive and set up five committees this year. In order to do that I am submitting to you that if we don’t want to keep on failing, because lots of Members were here, we recommended that these committees be set up. Without putting resources in there and putting honorarium, putting program money in there, it ain’t going to work. I’m asking you to give me two or three months to put this into the business plan review. For you to say it should be easy for you to just move $1.5 million, I don’t know how anyone gets that. It’s not that I don’t want to do it.