Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I awoke this morning I was listening to the news, and something that caught my attention – and I heard the report three times – and that was the national report on the Aboriginal prison population that has jumped in the last 10 years. In the report it says that Aboriginals are 4 percent of the Canadian population but 23 percent of all inmates in the correctional facilities. That’s very alarming. It also mentioned that 25 percent of them are males, one-third are females and then when you get into some of the western Canadian facilities that number goes up, in some cases over 65 percent.

There’s a lot of variables that I was thinking about and some of the presentations and discussions, briefings we had this week, specifically with Skills Canada they talked about low literacy rates that add to these things. Mental health and addictions, which we’ve discussed and has been mentioned in the Anti-Poverty Strategy, socio-economic factors, low employment rates, family violence, poverty and homelessness all contribute to putting our people into jails, and we can’t forget, either, the residential school system and some of our mental disorders that some people in the Northwest Territories have to live with. That kind of goes to something that we’ve been pushing on the side and the Minister responsible for Justice has actually been working on, is the mental health courts. How many of these individuals go through the system but come back out and continue to go through the system, not getting the appropriate help that they need, or ones that go into the system don’t get the appropriate judicial requirements that might get them treatment rather than being institutionalized. Literacy rates all go into effect in terms of looking at filling out forms or applications and possibly not understanding the conditions in which they were paroled. In some cases, that was mentioned in the report as well, that some of the parole conditions some of the Aboriginal people get picked up for are very minor and get sent back to jail.

So some of these things need to be addressed and I’d like to find the strategy, and I’ve been reviewing the 10-year strategy for the Department of Justice and some of those things are mentioned. So I will have questions today for the Minister of Justice on how we can bring those rates down and help our people in the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.