Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister Ramsay. It was very interesting to hear your opening remarks to this year’s budget. I’m very pleased to see there are going to be some initiatives that we have been working on for some time and certainly bringing them to reality within the years to come.
Mr. Ramsay has indicated that Justice is responsible for providing support to the needs of the people in the Northwest Territories, and like I have made comments to the Minister of Health,
there are communities without RCMP members. Over the years I’ve been a Member, I have a file that tells me all the reasons why you aren’t yet having members in our communities. I certainly don’t want to bring that out right now, but just that if you could correct me later on, my understanding was it was 10 or 11, but I could be wrong too. We do not have RCMP in our small communities, and I’m going to ask you, too, Mr. Ramsay, along with the Minister of Health, that I’d like to see a plan with all this money coming to the Northwest Territories through various avenues, is to start looking at where and how and when and all this good stuff, bringing a business plan to us on this side to let us know that this is what we’re doing, Cabinet, as government, to put RCMP members in our small communities. There has to be some special consideration given just like with the Minister of Health.
There are no full-time nurses in our communities, so if you’re really, truly looking and want to follow that vision, that belief, responsive to the needs of the people we serve, well, there are communities without RCMP members, and we’re not being responsible to their needs.
I’ve also heard through the previous Minister of how the communities are being served, which is once a month or three or four times a month. In today’s society, that doesn’t seem to be very helpful for us to not have RCMP in our communities. I just wanted to raise that with the Minister.
I know this is an O and M budget; however, it’s important, because I don’t see anything in the operations and maintenance that has to go inside with the infrastructure budget, but at least I could have seen some type of O and M planning studies or some kind of business case why we need to put RCMP in our small communities. The same with Health. I’m getting, I guess, a little bit frustrated that year after year the department comes to us, but they seem to forget that there are communities in the Northwest Territories that do not have RCMP members full-time, but they always seem to have really good reasons why they aren’t doing it, but they seem to be okay with other projects. That doesn’t fly with me.
I’m going to ask Mr. Ramsay if he could show some strong leadership and say, if there are 10 or 11 without RCMP, this is what we’re going to do. As a Member here for 10 years, I have not yet seen a plan, but also being here, I’ve heard of a lot of reasons why they can’t do it. Show me one good reason why they should be putting it in those communities, not 10,000 reasons why they can’t do it. That’s the responsive needs to our communities. If you go into any one of our communities that do not have RCMP members, that is not a very good thing to have in today’s society, but they certainly have a lot of money for other things.
I argued a couple years ago with the then previous Minister of Justice how many dollars we were putting in to put in a fence at the correctional centre here. I don’t know where that kind of thinking comes from, but that’s what we’ve got in the Department of Justice, putting money in a fence to keep inmates in but you can’t put money into a community for crime prevention and safety to put RCMP members in our community. I just don’t know where the senior management team is and what they’re thinking. We are the legislators. We should be the ones that are driving this initiative. I don’t know, but I’m a little bit confused on this issue, so I’m going to put that challenge to the Minister and to the Cabinet.
I’d like to see a business case of putting RCMP in the communities without RCMP. I remember one time we had an incident here in Yellowknife and just like that they had an RCMP assigned to a school. Quick, like that, but not in our communities. Something’s wrong. Something is terribly wrong. I think it’s time our communities deserved some respect and some justice and say we’re going to do this for the communities. That’s what I’d like to see.
I applaud the Minister for taking on some new initiatives because we worked on them together as the pilot case. I mean, that’s a good thing. Our Members pushed it over here. We have some new initiatives. The Minister of Justice and I have been working hard in our communities to get on-the-land treatment programs, corrections programs, and it’s up to our people to come up to the plate and say yes, we would like to have on-the-land programs. I know the Minister has been very supportive in that area to get inmates out on the land and to do their time out there, and to be educated, to get well and to get back into their communities. I see that as a positive step working towards the wellness of our communities.
The other thing I’d like to point out before I leave the floor is the justice system. If we are going to be responsive to the needs of our people, they have to be properly trained to interpret the legalities and the terminologies that the court system uses. We have to support our language, speaking First Nation mother tongue, and that court has to recognize this. This is an English law coming into an Aboriginal community, but now you’ve got to have our people be trained properly to understand justice as it’s meant to be, so we have to have some funding resources to do this. I think that we deserve this in our communities.
Again, I put a challenge to the Minister and his staff here. Look for money, train our people in our communities, the ones that want to go through the court system using their language. It should be a no-brainer. The days of going through the system without properly trained legal translators are over. I ask the Minister to consider, with the limited budget
that we have, how do we do this in our small communities such as Colville Lake or Fort Good Hope. It’s a lot of work for us. I mean, I’m only talking two communities, but I think the Minister knows and he’s up to the challenge. I think he’s new in this, it’s only four months, but I’d like him to know that some basic things need to be put in place and look at where we need to step back and see where we need to correct our system but are meeting the basic needs of our justice in policing, corrections, or in the court service. What are some of the things that we need to do to ensure that we are responsive to the needs of the people of the Northwest Territories.