Thank you, Mr. Chair. With respect to family violence, there are some identified facilities or houses or places where individuals can go throughout the Northwest Territories and we can probably pull together where some of those, in which communities some of those locations exist. But when it comes to child and family services, our goal is to make sure that the children are with families, so we’re working with the Foster Family Coalition to increase the number of foster families that are available.
We’ve heard clearly that there’s got to be a better way to engage families, to make sure that children stay with families, whether it’s a foster relationship or not. We’re not building facilities to put children in. We want to keep children in a family environment, so we wouldn’t be doing that.
With respect to shelters throughout the Northwest Territories where individuals or homeless people can go, we’ve had a lot of creative NGOs providing services in that particular area and we’ve been trying to find ways to support them where appropriate. I’ve had an opportunity to meet with the chief and ex-SAO from communities like Fort Good Hope who are developing community-based, community-driven plans to meet community needs,
and we’re always looking for ways to partner on projects like that that are community driven to meet those needs of communities that speak to the exact type of thing that the MLA has been referring.