Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Bromley. I was going to ask some of those questions. I will follow up to some of those questions Mr. Bromley was asking the Minister regarding the resource development RCMP, I guess you can call it.

There is family violence RCMP and now we have resource development RCMP. I hope this position can somehow make its way into where the Sahtu is having some oil and gas activity that increases a whole bunch of other things that RCMP only can deal with.

One of them is that the Norman Wells liquor store restriction has been lifted since February 1st . We

have been getting a lot of calls from communities.

The Minister and I did a tour and the Minister heard also the impacts of the lifting of the liquor sales in Norman Wells and the impacts on the communities, the families and the need for more RCMP presence. Actually, we heard some horror stories in Colville Lake, where bootlegging has gotten quite profitable. It is hitting our younger population. That is very sad. I’m hoping the Minister would have a good discussion with the future plans on how to look at those situations. Colville Lake, God bless their heart, have come up with very strong how they want to tackle in their community, and that is community leadership. They have come forward with saying this is what we want to do. They have taken the Minister to task and said this is what we want to do, can you help us out here. They come with some very strong positions.

The law enforcement, again, we need to look it up, beef it up. I would ask if the Minister sometime in this Assembly, this House here, if he would just provide again a list of communities without RCMP detachments. I don’t know if we did it every year. I just want to see if it increases to the better.

It’s more of a comment that we are looking for enforcement in our communities without RCMP. Sometimes the weather plays a role in the response to communities without members. It happened in Colville Lake because the weather was bad. They couldn’t drive. It was just a bad time. It was real bad timing. However, crime doesn’t know any time. It just does it, especially in small communities. The people are wondering what can they do, especially in very serious incidents. Sometimes the RCMP can’t get there for a day or two or three days. They are sort of held ransom. It is just through leadership that they could hold the community together and we get the phone call.

I just want to again remind the Minister about RCMP that are not in our communities. We are starting to think that’s the norm, which it isn’t. The communities that do have RCMP sort of take that for granted, the appreciation of members being there. I want to remind the Minister that we will do our part. Hopefully, the Department of Justice will do theirs. It’s more of a comment to the Minister. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Abernethy.

Madam Chair, I’ve had a lot of conversations with the Member, especially when we are travelling through the Sahtu, and we know the challenges that they’re facing with alcohol in the small communities and we are looking to work with the communities.

Once again, I go back to the community policing strategies or the community policing plans that are done between the RCMP and the community. It’s a great opportunity for the communities to make sure that their voice is being heard with respect to

policing. It’s going to continue to happen and we look forward to the partnerships. The Member is right; Colville Lake is a great example of a community who is standing up and saying no to alcohol use in their community, and if we can get those kind of relationships going with other communities, we can really start to see some change.

Thank you, Minister Abernethy. Mr. Moses.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to make one quick comment before I get into my question, that we’re very fortunate in Inuvik that we do have a pretty good police force and they are actually proactive doing a lot of patrols and they do our road checks and they’re very proactive. It’s really great.

The Minister mentioned the RCMP Complaints Commission. Does he have stats on how many complaints they receive for a year? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Moses. Minister Abernethy.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Not with me, but I will talk to the detachment and see if we can get some statistics for the Member.

When he gets the stats, I was wondering if he could give us a breakdown of the types of complaints that he does receive, the regions that the complaints come from and, even more specifically, which communities those complaints come from. It allows us to offer a little bit more insight on policing in the communities as we move forward. Thank you, Madam Chair.

I believe we can provide it by community, but we have to be careful that the statistics are not so small that they’re self-identifying. So as they get smaller, we may not be able to provide them by community, we may have to provide them by region. But we will provide you everything that we can legally provide you.

Thank you. No one further on my list. We are on page 9-17, activity summary, Justice, law enforcement, operations expenditure summary, $39.469 million.

Thank you, committee. Could I have some order please? Thank you, committee. Page 9-19, activity summary, Justice, legal aid services, operations expenditure summary, $5.905 million. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I may not be on the right area, but I wanted to ask the Minister is there any work being done with the legal interpreters, translators that sometimes need to be used in the court services.

Thanks, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Abernethy.

Thank you, Madam Chair. It may touch in this area, but it would also touch in courts. We do utilize interpreters. We have a list of interpreters that we can go to to provide services when we need them. We provide translation when asked, for sure. Thanks, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair, I appreciate the Minister’s flexibility on taking this question, because sometimes it gets into the courts and to legal services. So I just wanted to know if there is some legal aid training for the interpreters or translators. Sometimes we just pick them off the streets in our communities and we tell them to translate, and sometimes they’re hearing some pretty detailed, sensitive descriptions of some of the crimes, and sometimes they’re traumatized or sometimes they internalize some of the stuff. Sometimes they just don’t have that proper training to interpret properly what the lawyer or the judge is saying. So it gets very complicated and sometimes they make mistakes. So I just want to give support to those translators and interpreters who we do ask. Sometimes we pull them off the streets in our communities and say, well, you’re probably the best of the translators/interpreters, can you do this for us?

Is there any type of program in the future with the funding that you have, Mr. Minister, to look at some type of interpreters’ court training for the region? We have some pretty good interpreters that could be trained in the region that can go with the circuit. We have a couple in the Sahtu that would be just awesome, because they didn’t train before the government. So I’m looking for that type of initiative from this Minister. Thank you, Madam Chair.

The Member has certainly hit an area that we know there are some weaknesses, without question. We don’t provide medical terminology training to the interpreters. It’s an area that we need to find a way to find some improvements on. It’s going to take money, money we don’t happen to have, which is one of our biggest challenges.

As far as how interpreters travel with us, we tend to pick interpreters up at site at the location we’re going to, rather than necessarily having them travel with us. We try to find people who have had experience over time, coming back, coming back, coming back, coming back, but those individuals are becoming harder to find. So the Member is right; we need to do something, but it’s going to cost money and that’s one of our challenges.

The Minister is correct on this issue. I’m just glad the Minister is well aware of the issue. He knows it’s out there, he knows it’s going to cost some money to get this issue here.

However, I’d like to ask the Minister that when you look at this, you are serving Aboriginal people. We have rights, we have everything in there that needs to be honoured and be respected, and if our people can’t have that type of service by this government, then somewhere we’re failing to uphold those rights and to strengthen and protect those rights. So we are actually not living up to our obligations as a government and that is not right.

If the Minister continues to look at where we can find money, possibly down the road there might be more money coming out of this government to pay for things that the Aboriginal people are one day going to say that’s enough, that’s enough, let’s do the court challenge and let’s take the government to task on this, just like the French people. So I’m saying this to the Minister and this government that pretty soon enough is going to be enough. So I just wanted to let the Minister know and he’s well aware of it and he has to convince his Cabinet colleagues that we’d better pay attention, otherwise we’re going to face a lawsuit. So I appreciate the Minister giving me his previous response and I’ll take that to heart. Mahsi, Madam Chair.

The Member is right; we need to do more work, we need to do better work, we need to make sure that the service is there and I will absolutely work with my colleague, Minister Lafferty, on this language issue to see if we can find a solution in the best interest of the people of the Northwest Territories.

Thank you. Next on my list is Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Madam Chair. By just the name justice, the name itself implies the need for assistance, the need for intervention and my questions obviously are going to be revolving around the legal aid accessibility to our clients and to our residents.

With applications rising as high as they have in the last number of years, and we went in our business planning preparation phase to address this with the Minister and his team, and I know that I’m very pleased to hear that the Minister will be bringing forward a supp and I appreciate that. But even by doing that, by virtue of adding that one extra position, I have a hard time, and I think a lot of Members here have a hard time believing will that deal with backlog, will that deal with accessibility within a reasonable amount of time. And by reasonable, is four months reasonable? Is three months reasonable? Is 30 days reasonable? Can the Minister clarify have they done the studies as to what that one extra person will do in legal aid to mitigate the backlog so that maybe we can get some timelines in terms of what efficiencies we’re going to see with just maybe one more position? Or maybe we should be looking at two, maybe three. So I will start with that question first, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Minister Abernethy.

Thank you, Madam Chair. In addition to the obvious review of the Legal Aid Act, which is going to hopefully give us some new direction on how to provide these types of services, the department did actually increase the legal aid division in both 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 to a total of three lawyers. It took a bit longer to fill those positions than anybody would have liked to have had. Really, those lawyers are really only getting up to speed now, compared to what existed before when much of the backlog had occurred.

We’re optimistic with these three new lawyers, plus the new one that will hopefully come in by way of supps, that we will start to see some of the improvement that you’re talking about. Because you’re absolutely right; there’s a backlog and it’s inappropriate and it’s unfortunate for our residents. So between the three and the one new one, the three are now up to speed and we’re starting to see some results.

I guess the question I have, as well is accessibility for these lawyers. Is it the fact that we as a government, are we paying adequately to attract lawyers to come here to work or are we at a disadvantage? Are other jurisdictions doing more to attract this professional person to come this far north?