Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A significant amount of work has been done around child and family services. The 16th Legislative Assembly did a comprehensive review where this exact question came up on a number of occasions. Also, the Auditor General recently brought forward a fairly scathing report of child and family services here in the Northwest Territories, and committee has been very, very, very active in articulating their concerns and their desire for significant change. As a result, we are moving forward with Building Stronger Families, an action plan to transform the child and family services system here in the Northwest Territories, and this is a fundamental change in how we do business here in the Northwest Territories.
Currently, we already have the ability to work with families in a case of apprehension, and our goal is not to take children away. If a child needs to be apprehended as a result of abuse-type situations, we would like to work with the families to keep them in the community. If we can’t keep them in the community, we want to work with the regions to keep them in the region; and if we can’t keep them in the region, obviously we will have to look at other locations possibly.
But in a foster family situation we do have the ability to work with elders to go through a foster application so that we can put children with their grandparents or other family members. It doesn’t need to just be their grandparents. There are some challenges with that because we still need people to pass the application process in order to legally ensure the security and safety of those children.
We are working on this. We are fundamentally changing the way we provide child and family services here in the Northwest Territories, and I am regularly keeping committee up to date on the important work that is being done in this area.