Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Before I get into my question here, I would like to read an excerpt from an article in a paper that I recently read.

“An Aboriginal girl born in Canada today will die up to 10 years earlier than the national average. She is more likely to live in a crowded home without access to clean running water. She is more likely to be sexually or physically abused and stands a far greater chance of becoming addicted to tobacco, alcohol and drugs. She is more prone to host a life- threatening ailment like diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and worse yet, as a recent RCMP report showed, she is five times more likely than her non- Aboriginal counterpart to meet a violent end at the hands of another.”

I would like to thank Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Yakeleya for bringing this motion forward. It is a motion that touches everybody here in this Great Hall, in this Chamber, in this House. It’s a motion that touches everybody across the Northwest Territories.

Members here today have spoken very compassionately on why they are going to be supporting the motion and why we need to take action and step up to the plate and also encourage

our other national counterparts to do the same, our other jurisdictions across Canada.

Mr. Speaker, you know this, every Member in this House knows this, when something happens in the Northwest Territories, whether it’s somebody missing, Aboriginal or non, we have such a small population and when somebody does die, that we do, in fact, it affects everybody. Everybody talks about it the next day. Everybody feels sorry for the family. Everybody sends condolences and we make statements in the House regarding that.

You heard Mr. Hawkins give out some statistics about why this is important. The Native Women’s Association of Canada, in a recent report, out of 582 cases, 60-some percent, two-thirds, were murder cases. Sometimes the person that did this heinous crime was known to the victim. Twenty percent of these cases are categorized as missing; 4 percent are suspicious death; 9 percent unknown.

When something like this has happened, it’s the family and the children that are also impacted by the disappearance or a murder that has happened. So when we talk about this, we are also talking about the families, we are talking about the kids who don’t have a mother.

Over the course of this session, you have heard me speak to many, many issues that can really impact this without going to a national inquiry, without doing the national roundtable, which I do support.

I have made recommendations. I have talked in this House about the coroner’s reports and recommendations. This is a national issue, but it also happens in our backyard. I know the recommendations out of the coroner’s reports aren’t binding; however, there are some really good things in there that could have possibly prevented something else from happening further. Yet we take those recommendations and sometimes we don’t act on them.

I have also spoken about victim coordinator support. In some domestic violence cases, the victim is too afraid to go to the RCMP or too afraid to go through with pressing the charges. Sometimes that victim actually relies on that individual, her partner, or it could be another family member, by providing the necessities of life – food, shelter – and they continue to go like that. So when that person goes to jail, they can’t go ahead with it. However, we do have some amazing victim coordinators in the Northwest Territories that will work with victims, get them to the courts, help them make the impact statements, get them into the RCMP stations and help them every step along the way so that this stops.

I have also reviewed, over this last little while, domestic violence review committees, something that I know our coroner is in strong support of and something that we need here in the Northwest

Territories. Jurisdictions such as Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba and BC all have very good terms of reference. The mission in most of them is just to conduct a comprehensive review of all domestic violence deaths and make recommendations that will help prevent deaths as well as reduce and eliminate domestic violence in whatever jurisdiction it is. That’s what we need here in the Northwest Territories.

These review committees would help to identify the presence or absence, in a lot of cases, of systematic issues within the system, within the government system, problems, gaps or shortcomings of each case to facilitate appropriate recommendations for prevention, and that’s what we need.

Like I said, I’d like to thank Mr. Hawkins and Mr. Yakeleya for bringing this motion forward and I’d like to thank all Members who spoke very compassionately about it and in some cases talked of personal experiences. But I’d also like to thank all stakeholders, all groups, not only in the Northwest Territories but across Canada, who are speaking on this issue, who see the importance of this issue and who know that we’ve got to start doing something right now so that this doesn’t continue to exist within our nation, even within our territory.

So with that said, I’d just like to thank all Members who are going to be in support of this motion, as I will be supporting the motion. Thank you.