Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have the numbers of the children that were apprehended. Actually, I guess better yet, the children that are working with the child and family services people or a social worker. Some of them are in a voluntary agreement with the family and some are placed in foster care. We do have a total – I’ll just need to bring this a little bit closer. I would pick a date, Mr. Bromley, because it changes all the time. As of November 30, 2012, we had 582 children receiving services. Of that, 356 of those children were receiving services like counselling, respite services, at the request of parents. Parents do not lose custody of these children of that group. Some are in the custody of foster care but the majority, I guess, 61 percent of the children receiving services are receiving services in their home.
Then we do have the trends as well here, but we’re just pulling up the information. We have so much information here we need to locate the information.
Maybe I could talk a bit about our work with trying to develop child and family services. We had one committee, that committee quit functioning. We’re trying to get that committee up and running again. The community has actually asked that committee be functional again. We had gone to beginning the work in the recommendations of the Child and Family Services Act review, and that recommendation was to try to place child and family services committees in all of the communities where there were children that were receiving services. We were not able to do that. It is my opinion that it would be a matter of sustaining the pressure, I suppose, on the communities to try to get them to come up with a committee from the Department of Health and Social Services or from the health and social services authorities across the territory. An example, I went into the Sahtu, I guess a year after the recommendations were made, and there was no work done on developing the child and family services committees but there was work done in Healthy Families, another recommendation. Which we had direct control over as a department, the money is coming through the department and that was one of the other key members.
As far as the 73 recommendations within that report, what I think we would have to do is show a response to the report. We recognize that in some places we’d have to do the change in the act in order to carry out the recommendations. Some of the recommendations we have acted on and carried out. We can provide that report but it would be difficult to go through each recommendation in this forum. Our information here, the statistics show
that there is a very slight decrease in children receiving services from Social Services.