Mr. Chairman, if I could ask for a detailed breakdown of the contract services, $12.724 million, that would be very useful. I would appreciate that this afternoon. Thank you.

Mr. Elkin.

Next I have Mr. Beaulieu.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Minister Lee.

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.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Your time is up. I can put you back on the list if you want but I’m going to go to the next person on the list. Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Hard to know where to start here. I listened to the Minister answer Mr. Abernethy’s questions with regard to the business plan and what we thought was there and what apparently is not there anymore. The Minister just mentioned, and I am reading from page 42 of the Health and Social Services business plan, and it says work with communities to establish child and family service committees and at least five more communities in this business year. That’s from the business plan which Social Programs committee spent a great deal of time discussing, debating, getting information on in September of 2010. I have to ask the Minister, if that phrase is in the business plan, what does it mean to her in terms of money?

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I clarified that in my letter to the committee and all the Members on February...actually, this morning. The five committees that we’re talking about in the business plan is to do it the way we’ve been doing it, which is to have no money in it. That’s not new. There have been no monies to set up children and family services committees. Okay? So we will continue to do that. But we have seen very poor results out of that.

I want to say, the CFSA standing committee report said that you would like us to get a lot more aggressive and have a more robust program. You want us to set this up, five committees, and make it work. What I’m proposing to you, to make it work, it will take some money, and I don’t have new money in the budget.

I guess it’s an issue of how we interpret words. To me, establish child and family service committees means that you will work to establish those committees. The word “work” is in there. The verb is in there. To me there’s an action

involved in that. The Minister states that they intended to do things as they have done it in the past. Well, that’s no action at all. One child and family service committee was organized in Fort McPherson. It fell apart. It’s maybe gotten back together again. I fail to see how this statement, an action to work with communities to establish committees, doesn’t indicate that there will be some work on the part of the department. Work on the part of the department translates into money. Time is money. Staff would have to be doing something. I really fail to understand how the Minister can say that this action is here but it’s not going to cost any money. In my view that has been done in the last five or 10 years and it has translated into zero. If you’re not doing anything, absolutely you’re not going to get any results.

I really am distressed that we approved the business plan as a committee. I certainly did, as a member of the committee, based on what was on the business plan. I, unfortunately, believed what was on the paper. I don’t know if the Minister is suggesting that business plans don’t matter, that what’s on the paper can change so don’t worry about it. Maybe we don’t even need to bother to read business plans, because the department can turn around and interpret the words on the paper almost any way they want. Because that’s what I’m hearing right now. I’m really quite disturbed.

The other part that the Minister has referenced is that the Child and Family Services Act review report suggests a really robust action to set up these child and family service committees. I guess it’s a matter of defining “robust.” I’m reading from the report and it says “amend the act to require the director to provide funds, salary for a committee coordinator, per diems for members’ training, and support to child and family service committees.” I think that’s the same as “work to set up committees; (b) allow flexibility of mandate and function for the committees so that the communities can create a model appropriate to their culture and situation, and (c) allow and encourage child and family service committee members to participate in the process and develop the supporting policy.” That’s not very robust in my mind. I guess if you interpret work to set up committees as spending no money, then, yes, this recommendation is pretty robust because it says spend some money.

I have to say that the Minister in her communications to committee relative to the issues that we’ve got and the lack of funding have taken the most expensive assessment of what we’re looking for. A number of times in the report I believe we referenced child and family service committees which needed to be flexible, which could be combined with other organizations within the communities that are already established. The community justice committees was one that was mentioned. There are interagency committees in a

number of communities. They certainly could belong to that. There’s a huge amount of flexibility in how the child and family service committees could be set up. They don’t need to be funded to the tune of the amount of money that’s in the letter that we got from the Minister.

I didn’t hear the Minister answer the question from Mr. Beaulieu. She suggests that child protection workers need to be trained to the tune of $125,000 a year. I really have to question, if we have child protection workers that need that kind of training, they shouldn’t be in the business of child protection I don’t think. In my mind, a child protection worker is a trained social worker and I really am not understanding what kind of training they need to work with a child and family service committee. It’s a matter of being able to communicate and if social workers can’t communicate, we’re in big trouble. I guess I’d like to ask the Minister again why we have to spend $125,000 to train child protection workers for child and family service committees.

I just want to say that… And I am answering the Member’s question. The business plan speaks of not just the dollar amounts but some of the action items that the department wants to do. Dollars aren’t exactly always attached to some of those action items. It’s a business plan, it’s a blueprint where the department’s going to go, any department’s going to go for next year.

Like I stated before, I think this is about the third time I’m saying it, yes, in the business plan we said we will work to set up children and family services committees, like we have always done before. I am here admitting to you that we have not had success doing that. There were no specific dollars attached to doing that. We said we will continue to work on those. The way we’ve been doing it is we have, from the headquarters, asked the authorities to go out into the communities and work with the communities. The only community that has shown interest so far is Fort McPherson and that’s been going on for about five years. We’re still at a very delicate stage of getting it going. What we have heard on the ground from the people who want it, people who are really involved in Fort McPherson, is that they need more resources and support to do that. They would like some training to be able to work on that. Everyone would like honorarium because they know that in other committees they get money to attend these meetings. We’re just simply identifying that if the Assembly and the department really want to get this on the ground, I need to go before the next budget cycle and ask for some real money to do that.

I think it’s in the interest, actually, of the committee to make sure that to have your recommendation implemented, there has to be some money behind that. There are no contradictions between business plan and what we are saying here. We have always

planned and we do continue to work on setting these up. But I believe in order to do that right, we need to spend the money.

I’m going to ask Paddy, the deputy minister, on what we mean by training the child protection workers. Sorry. Dana.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Heide.

Thank you, Mr. Heide. Ms. Bisaro.

I can squeeze this question in here. Mr. Heide just said it’s $4,000 to $5,000 to train one worker.

Minister Lee.

No, $45,000.

Oh, $45,000. Okay. That’s fine. So you’re suggesting that we might train one worker three times in a year. Is that correct?

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Heide.

Thank you, Mr. Heide. Ms. Bisaro, your time is up. I’m going to go to the next person on the list. If you want back on the list, let me know. The next person on the list is Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Sitting here, flashback for the last 16 years. I think I’ve heard the same excuses from this department. To find a way to avoid doing what you’re legally obligated to do. Right now we went out of our way to have a public review of legislation that was brought into place back in the 13

th

Assembly. Four

Assemblies later we’re still talking about the same issue.

We have some 600 children in care -- 600 -- at a cost of over $12 million a year to keep them in that system. I think it’s critical to realize that we have to find a way of breaking that cultural style of dealing with children. We have to find a way to reunite those children with their birth parents and find a way to get them to remain in our communities, not be taken away, and make the appropriate investments on prevention.

I heard all the Members talk about prevention is key. Preventing the system from getting there in the first place. Intervening early enough that you intervene with the families that you know are having social challenges. That you’re dealing with the fabric of what those families are going through, whether it’s substance abuse, poverty, addiction. That is the core problem we are having with a lot of these families. The key to that is to have a system in place that’s transparent and includes communities solving the problems at the community level. That’s why it’s critical that these committees be activated, implemented and given the adequate resources to do it.

I mean, we’re spending $12 million. If you can even take 60 of those children out of the system and reunite them with their families, just think that you’re saving yourself 10 percent. That’s $1.2 million. That’s the money you’re looking for. The achievement is 10 percent of what we have right now. Is there a way that we can decrease those numbers by 10 percent in this fiscal year and also going forward? Can we achieve that under the system that we have?

I have to disagree with the Minister saying don’t worry about it, we’ll work it into the next budget. Excuse me, but this is the last budget of the 16

th

Assembly. This is it. This is what we have to work out of to see any major changes going forward.

I’d just like to ask the Minister about re-profiling the dollars that we already have in the system, the $12 million we’re already spending on children services, and also looking at the resources we’re spending on structures such as boards and agencies. I need to illustrate again that the Beaufort-Delta health board has a budget of I think $41 million with an increase of I think about $6 million from the previous year. It’s $12 million. There’s an increase from last year to this year for $4 million, but again, you don’t have a board. It’s the public trustee that oversees the board, so that money that’s there for the board that’s not being used for the board, can those dollars be used to establish these types of committees? That’s an option that I’m putting to the Minister. There’s money identified for board type of activities such as the health board in Inuvik that does not exist. It’s in the budget. Can you move

those dollars to establish those types of committees in the Beaufort-Delta region?