I appreciate the Minister’s commitment there and I think I’ll hold up on that one and ask that he provide that to us as soon as possible. That would be helpful.
The last one I have on this page is the considerable cost, almost a 50 percent increase to the cost for children in residential care outside the Northwest Territories. This is a very, very sad state to me. The last time we visited this issue was when the Child and Family Services Act was reviewed by the Social Programs committee. At that time we were assured by the department that those numbers were on the decline and great progress was being made. Now we have, as I mentioned, just about a 50 percent increase in costs.
As well, the number of children in care has gone up, or the number of childcare months has gone up and the cost is really ramped up even relative to those figures. So we’re now at well over $7 million. If we’re looking after special needs children here outside of the Northwest Territories… The reason why I kind of harp on this a little bit is because we had some very specific recommendations from the Child and Family Services Committee review to address exactly this sort of thing. One of which was the establishment of the child and family services committees in every community within the Northwest Territories, and we fought hard for and successfully got funding to establish five such committees and the department has failed to establish those here in the tenth month of our 12-month fiscal year.
So I guess what are we doing to address this and do we have no capacity for these children? I assume we have no capacity for these children in the Northwest Territories or we would have them here. But what are we doing to implement the sorts of mechanisms that the review highlighted as being needed to reduce these costs? Thank you.