The government has given Health and Social Services $470,000 to work on the creation of the Child and Family Services Committee. We think that will go a long ways to the prevention. The Member is right; we haven’t struck any of those committees at this point. We are, as
this is all part of our tours to do consultation in communities. When we went into the Sahtu we looked at and we had an initial meeting with the health and social services authority, and at that time the health and social services authority felt like it was adding another layer of government to the system and thought it was going to just do nothing more than add costs.
After I met with the authority, along with the staff that were travelling with me, it became fairly clear that our intention of creating child and family services was for a good reason. That was that over the long term it would save costs.
The department is going to be offering the Train the Trainer workshops in Beaufort-Delta so that staff have the tools to establish the child and family services committees in the communities.
I think that I was surprised that each of the authorities, there was a plan for each of them, although they didn’t action the stuff yet, that each of them had a plan to try to create as many child and family services committees as possible. We looked at the numbers that I know at the top of my head right now would be in the Sahtu. When I travelled there with the Member for Sahtu we looked at the numbers. We say that two of the communities there may not need child and family services committees but the other three would need them. There was an actual call in the communities for them to be established.
Right now, back in October they delivered some of the workshops referred to as Child and Family Services Committees Train the Trainer Workshops. The authorities were doing them and they were delivering some of the programs in every authority except for the Beaufort-Delta. We’re hoping that by the end of March of this year that we’re going to hire a child and family services committees coordinator, and that individual will be located here, and we’re going to try to give that individual the responsibility to strike as many of these committees as possible. We’re actually working on it.
We’re not ignoring committee recommendations on these at all, it’s just taking some time to look at everything, train the staff and fill the appropriate positions.