Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It has been about 30 months since we’ve been in this government here, and recommendations from the 16th Legislative Assembly specifically on the report

that was tabled in the House yesterday with the

child and family services, which I believe the current and the previous Ministers of Health and Social Services where very strong advocates on, and yet we see this report in front of us today.

As stated from some of my colleagues, there are many areas that we can focus on with this report, but I would like to talk a little about the accountability. In the report it states that the Department of Health and Social Services is responsible for the overall management of the child and family service system. It also states that the Minister has authorized southern health and social services authorities to assist the director in the management, control and operation of child and family services.

That director also has many of the rights and responsibilities of a parent when children are receiving services. In turn, these responsibilities are passed on to the child protection workers, and the child protection workers then exercise many duties and powers of the director but are employees of the regional authorities, so this accountability is all mixed up in there somewhere. However, the director does remain accountable for all decisions made by the child protection workers.

I am going to talk a little bit about these child protection workers. There are 93 of them in the Northwest Territories. They work with children and families on a daily basis. Some of the things they have to deal with are they are exposed to traumatic and stressful situations, other duties include they manage children’s cases, prepare legal documents, appear in court while dealing with child protection situations that require immediate attention. There are a lot of problems there, a lot of work.

Last year, ‘12-13, 1,042 children received services with only 93 child protection workers. That is a concern. When you look at measuring success results, it states that the percentage of children receiving services in their own community was 87.5 percent. That means that there are more children receiving services in their own community, putting more stress on our child protection workers. So, when we are going forward, we are not only looking at the children but we have to look at the employees that do services on behalf of the government.

The Minister did state that he is going to be working with the Standing Committee on Social Programs and I look forward to those discussions and dialogues and how we can address this problem. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.