Thank you, Madam Chair. The community justice committees are an incredibly valuable resource that’s available in the communities. We provide funding support to the communities. It is limited but the committees have been very creative with what they are able to accomplish with those dollars.
In addition to dollars to support the committee, they can apply for funding to do special activities like on-the-land programs or whatnot. Many, many communities take advantage of that. We don’t tell communities what to do. These community justice committees come up with ideas based on what they know about their community, and the people in their communities, and what they think will work.
We would like to see a community justice committee in every community in the Northwest Territories. I continue at every opportunity I get to talk to communities that don’t have a community justice committee, and encourage them to put one in place. I direct them to community justice committees where we’re having significant success and where we’ve had really great results. One of them is Deline. Deline has a fantastic community justice committee with real, real talented people doing really creative things. I often refer people to look at what’s going on in Deline and see if they can build on their model.
Having said that, we don’t have community justice committees in every community. We’d like to. As a result, there’s always a little bit of money available that we’ve been able to roll out towards the end of fiscal years that goes above and beyond what an individual committee can get. That’s because we do have some vacancies. We will roll that out. We will make it to communities on an application basis as they see fit to use on these exact programs that you’re talking about. We see it as a real valuable service. We get great results from the communities where they are. We would like to see them in more.
Begging committee’s indulgence, my brain is no longer blanked. I’d like to go back to a few things on Mr. Bromley’s question because I completely lost it halfway through there. It happens.
The Department of Justice completed two projects evaluating protection against family violence legislation, and it’s impacted and found that the act is meeting its goals, and increasing awareness and protection. In 2011 the Protection Against Family Violence Act Evaluation Report is available through the Department of Justice website. I think there were a lot of questions raised about that.
The NWT, as you all know, has one of the highest rates of family violence in Canada, and the future health of our territory depends upon successfully addressing some of these violence issues in our homes. The department is focusing on protecting victims and their children, holding violent people accountable for their actions while providing them opportunities for change. We do have emergency protection orders, and there were some concerns about those and some recommendations came forward. We’ve worked on fixing that, where appropriate, and we’re also focused on educating the people who use these tools so that they know when they should be used, and how they should be used and what is appropriate. We also have the Wekeahkaa that we talked about earlier. We have the Domestic Options Court available to us as well. We’re always interested in new and creative solutions to help us combat family violence. There’s a number of good organizations who have been working on this and they continue to provide us recommendations and, where possible, we look at implementing them to find some of those solutions. I apologize for my earlier blank, but I hope that answers the previous question.