Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes, that Bill 10, Northwest Territories Lands Act, be read for the second time.

Mr. Speaker, this bill substantially mirrors the Territorial Lands Act of Canada in accordance with the requirements of the Northwest Territories Lands and Resources Devolution Agreement. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The motion is in order. To the principle of the bill.

Question has been called. Bill 10 has had second reading and is referred to committee.

---Carried

Honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I seek unanimous consent to waive Rule 69(2) and have Bill 10, Northwest Territories Lands Act, moved into Committee of the Whole. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Unanimous consent granted

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Item 20, consideration in Committee of the Whole of bills and other matters, with Mr. Dolynny in the chair.

By the authority given to me as Speaker by Motion 10-17(5), I hereby authorize the House to sit beyond the daily hour of adjournment to consider business before the House. Thank you.

Good afternoon, committee. I’d like to call Committee of the Whole to order. We have three items on the agenda today: Bill 5, An Act to Amend the Motor Vehicles Act; Tabled Document 4-17(5); and Tabled Document 22-17(5). What is the wish of committee? Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Committee wishes to continue with Tabled Document 22-17(5), NWT Main Estimates 2014-2015. We would like to start the Department of Justice and, time permitting, Industry, Tourism and Investment and perhaps Finance. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Does committee agree?

Great. Thank you, committee. We will commence after a short recess.

----SHORT RECESS

I’d like to call Committee of the Whole back to order. We are going to be working on the Department of Justice. With that, I’ll turn it over to the Minister of Justice for his opening comments. Minister Ramsay.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today I am presenting the 2014-2015 Main Estimates for the Department of Justice.

The department’s mandate is the administration of justice in the Northwest Territories, including policing and corrections. The department is also responsible for providing support to the courts. Within this mandate we continue to build a system of justice that is open, accessible and responsive to the needs of the people we serve. We support families when they are in conflict or personal crisis, and help them as they work toward successful resolutions.

The department’s main estimates propose an operations expenditure budget of just under $125 million. This represents an increase of 7.3 percent over the 2013-2014 Main Estimates. This includes just over $6.1 million in additional funding to ensure core programs and services have sufficient resources to operate, and it also includes $2.5 million to fund initiatives that will enhance and improve service delivery to the residents of the Northwest Territories.

The bulk of our resources go towards maintaining core programs and services the people of the Northwest Territories rely on, and making sure that these programs are efficient and effective. We support this Assembly’s goal of sustainable, vibrant, safe communities. We provide safe and secure custody of offenders and community supervision to

support rehabilitation and reintegration back into communities.

Department of Justice staff assist youth in trouble with the law, victims who have been harmed, people who need lawyers, families who need help working through separation or divorce, and offenders who need support to make better choices. Staff are located in regional offices bringing them close to the people we serve; however, we do not do this alone. We have strong partnerships with NGOs, community justice committees, community and Aboriginal governments, and our colleagues within the GNWT.

The Department of Justice also meets the needs of residents through our services to government. These include the provision of legal advice and legislative drafting for all departments as well as policy advice and support on access to information and protection of privacy matters. While these areas may not be clearly apparent to most, they are the foundation of a strong and effective government and are an essential part of our program and service work. These services will be under pressure this year, as we move forward with the Devolution Agreement and take on new responsibilities from the federal government. In response, we have identified $1.4 million to assist with this vital work and support the Assembly’s priority for an implemented agreement.

As I have mentioned before, providing these services and programs during times of fiscal restraint remains challenging. The justice system is experiencing pressures similar to those confronting other departments. Socio-economic factors contribute to a rate of police-reported crime that continues to be the highest in Canada. It is vital that we not simply react but take the time to fully investigate and plan, making sound decisions that are proactive and fiscally responsible.

We are working towards this by proposing investments in areas to support this Assembly’s priorities. New in this year’s main estimates are resources aimed at strengthening our services and improving the way that we work with our partners. We are proposing additional resources in the amount of $807,000 to pilot an Integrated Case Management Project. Additionally, we are proposing to move forward on the implementation of a wellness court. The purpose of this court is to assist those in our society who come into conflict with the law because of addictions or mental health issues. Funds in the amount of $300,000 are budgeted to implement this court in the 2014-2015 fiscal year.

Justice programs and services also provide the GNWT with modest revenue of just under $14.3 million, or 11.5 percent of the department’s expenditure budget. These revenues are either generated through cost-sharing agreements with

the Government of Canada for access to justice and youth justice services, exchange of services agreements for housing federal and Nunavut offenders, or through the collection of fees and fines in legal registries and the Territorial and Supreme Courts.

The budget presented today is prudent, responsible, and will allow the department to continue to work on Assembly priorities and serve NWT residents.

I thank you for the opportunity to provide an overview of the department’s 2014-15 Main Estimates and I look forward to discussing it in more detail with you. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Minister Ramsay, do you have witnesses you’d like to bring into the House?

Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Does committee agree?

Thank you, committee. Sergeant-at-Arms, please escort the witnesses into the Chamber.

Minister Ramsay, please introduce your witnesses to the House, for the record.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my right is Sylvia Haener, deputy minister of the Department of Justice; and to my left is Kim Schofield, director of finance for the Department of Justice. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Ms. Schofield, Ms. Haener, welcome to the Chamber.

Committee, we’re going to begin today’s deliberations with some general comments. With that, with our conventional protocol, I will allow Members to go through one time for 10 minutes and I will allow the Minister to respond. If I could say to the Minister, you do not need to respond to each individual question within the parameter from the Members. Maybe aggregate your responses accordingly. With that, we’ll open up to general comments. Mr. Yakeleya.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. General comments. Mr. Blake.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a few comments for the Minister along the same lines of policing. I know the community of Fort McPherson has received an extra RCMP to manage Tsiigehtchic, and as the Minister committed to having one of the officers overnighting in Tsiigehtchic, I just have to ask the question of funding. Has the detachment in Fort McPherson received extra funding to implement that? That is one of my major concerns. I know the Minister is willing to work with the Minister of Housing to line up a place to stay, but I look forward to that and I know we are a ways off from a detachment, but I think we are in the right direction. I look forward to working with the Minister, moving forward to that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Blake. Moving on with general comments, I have Mr. Nadli.