I appreciate that information. I did not hear anything about the child and family services prevention programs that we had recognized are needed here. There’s a national case going forward today where one of the workers we had involved in the review, Cindy Blackstock, is sort of leading the charge to take the Government of Canada to court, I believe, on their failure to appropriately fund Aboriginal children across Canada. I want to know that we are doing funding as we should be. There were a number of things that were identified, but funding is obviously only part of it.
We have funding in place. We need people who will go after the best spending of those sorts of things, and I hasten to add that I’ve been in discussions with my colleagues and we acknowledge that we wear some of that responsibility here, because I think these are our communities in all our ridings. So we need to be working with our communities to take advantage of the opportunity.
In this case here, we’ve got funding for five community committees and none of them up and running yet. But I want to know what we’re doing on the prevention side to implement these recommendations in an aggressive way.
I just want to point out that there’s a phenomenon here that we’re seeing repeated: the energy issues. You know, by not investing – and we know the returns are great, the paybacks are great – we’re paying at the other end big time now and it’s taking away other options. The same with the Hay River pension situation, of course. It’s now gone beyond our ability to address that $10 million. Here we have a situation again with child care. So I want to know that we are making good use of these dollars and not letting them slide. So can I get a sure answer that we’re actually going to do that here and get going on the prevention towards ultimately decreasing the escalating cost of looking after children outside of the NWT? Thank you.