Thank you. I want to continue on with the Minister’s interesting topic that we are discussing. It’s a huge infrastructure for the facility and talking about the remand inmates that are in there. These are the inmates that are still waiting for court trial, so we don’t know if they are guilty or not guilty. They are still going through the court process. For that reason, they are limited to certain programs anyhow, as I understand. I have talked to some guys who are on remand who are in there and they do a lot of sitting. They don’t have much programming there, because they don’t know if they are going to be convicted or not convicted. So there is limited programming.
I understand what the Minister is saying. I’m hoping that he would do other programming for these people that are sitting there waiting for a court trial, to do some more work so they can better
themselves. I get that. I actually do. That’s what we have. I certainly get it that the developer and the residents that are building their lots close to the land where the correctional centre is, are putting up an honour fence. I’m not too sure what I know about the honour fence. I don’t even know what an honour fence is. I know what an honourable gentleman’s agreement is, but what is an honour fence? Is it something that we can build on? Do we have to put a whole new security fence up? I’m looking at what type of collaboration we could have there with the residents.
The Minister stated very clearly that security is the bottom line of this discussion here. I do get it, for everybody’s own piece of mind to go to sleep at night that this is what we put in place. I do get it. I guess at this time when I’m asking for key, essential infrastructure in our smaller communities, that when I hear that there are limited funds, we don’t have much left, that something like this pops up into the infrastructure, it’s a lot of dollars that could go towards other key infrastructures in the Department of Justice in our communities. I was hoping that maybe the Minister would one day say yes, we do have money for an RCMP in our nine or 10 communities that don’t have RCMP members stationed in their communities, but we have money for this project here.
I’m not too sure how to speak to this. I’m just very disappointed in this coming forward at this time with other needs in our communities such as an RCMP in Colville Lake, Tsiigehtchic, so then we can get health nurses in those communities.
There are have and have-not communities in the Northwest Territories. Our communities are treated differently and they are not equal. There are different classes of people living in our communities. Good for you if you are living in a community with 2,000 or 3,000 people, but not too good for you if you are living under 200 or under 500, because you’re not going to receive some of essential basic services that this government is responsible for, but yet you can put a fence around a jail here that will keep inmates from escaping, keeping them in there so they can have more programming for them, which I’m all for it, but we need to do first things first.
I’m going to leave it at that. I think the Minister knows my feelings and my disappointment on him not bringing forward RCMP infrastructure money. That should have been done a long time ago. Maybe if we had that, more inmates could go into the centre. This is a priority, the safety of our community and the protection of our people. They are more concentrating on the jail than a community such as Colville Lake by not having an RCMP infrastructure there, or other communities without RCMP. I will leave it at that, Mr. Chair.