Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the Minister and the delegation here today. I was very impressed that we have a new RCMP position that deals with family violence as a coordinator. Knowing full well that spousal violence in the NWT is almost 10 times the national average and 85 percent of those, women are usually the victim, so it is nice to see that happening. We will be looking forward to seeing the fruits of that newly installed position. I do caution the Minister, though, that we need to make sure to move forward with this new position, that we get the proper measuring tools and communication platform that Regular Members as well as, I am sure, the general public would be able to follow up with that newly created position. I do applaud the Minister and the department for coming up with that.

In your opening address you talked about all residents should have access to justice, including legal aid. I just want to spend a little time here talking about legal aid. When we get into the budget line, we may want to question that. It’s unchanged this year. I do have some concerns. Normally I am one of those Members who will actually tell you to maybe take things out of the budget to save money. It’s rare that I will say now maybe it is time to look at putting money into something to make program services better.

Applications for legal aid rose 14 percent from 2009 to 2011. Applications for legal aid have increased 60 percent since the beginning of this millennium of 2000-2001. When you see a flood budget, it does raise suspicions. Are we catering to the need for legal aid with case backlog as high as four months? I think all Members here are sometimes a bit concerned. Are we really serving the needs of people who can access legal aid? Are we modernizing legal aid enough? Are we making it cost effective? With a flood budget, it just is not compelling enough to know we are addressing those issues.

The courts themselves, from a physical layout perspective, anyone who has gone in and seen the operation in action, there definitely needs to be upgrades from the telecommunication or videoconferencing point of view. I believe that the budget is potentially lacking in that. Again, this is more of a physical opportunity to improve services by modernizing videoconferencing. It has been in the budget for a number of years now. I am still surprised to see that we are not focusing more time and attention in that area. The investment that we require to bring our physical layout of the courts up to par, I think it might be slightly overlooked.

On the aspect of the court system themselves, you talked in your opening address about families who need help on working through separation and divorce. It’s no denial to anyone that the divorce rate is relatively high, not only in the Territories but as well as in Canada or the world, for that matter. Parents need help and parents need support to work around the child. I know you created a child service lawyer in the last 16th Assembly which is a

good initiative, but I know the Minister and myself and some other Members have talked about the concept of equal parenting. This is something that I know has been brought up in the House a couple of times. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that this is something potentially that could be looked at piloting to look at aiding all parents through the parenting process during a very difficult time in the family so that all parents can have the ability to see their kids.

Next on my list, having had the ability to tour some of the correction facilities and looking at the lack of alcohol treatment, alcohol is prevalent. It is probably the most prevalent drug in the community as well as in the Northwest Territories, for that matter. Offenders most likely in a lot of cases are trying to wean themselves off alcohol. We find that, and this is coming a lot from the Social Programs committee, that alcohol treatment needs to be a more program response in our dealings with inmates. We would like to see the department focus more time and attention on such programming and developing models of success that can be implemented in all of our facilities and correction facilities in the Northwest Territories.

Finally, the issue again, not mentioned in the opening address, is the issue of those who do reoffend. The issue of reoffending is very high in the Territories. I don’t have the statistics. I’m sure the Minister has more access to those types of numbers. Reoffenders are the ones in which sometimes the result of the system not providing enough corrective measures through either community justice, through corrections or through diversion courts. We have a very hard time as a government measuring how we deal with reoffenders. We need those measurables to make sure that we are keeping the pulse and making sure that our corrective behaviour for dealing with these reoffenders are being dealt with. Currently, as I said, in your opening address and even in the budget, you don’t see a lot of areas where we can make improvements for reoffenders and help with the family violence and probably some of the hard crimes that deal with reoffending.

Madam Chair, that’s all the opening comments that I have for today. I will have probably some more as we open up into detail. Thank you.