Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to make some comments on this bill similar to the comments that I made the other night when we reviewed the bill clause by clause.

As the Minister said, this has been a long time coming. It’s four years of work by the department, but it started with work in the 16th Assembly, as has been mentioned. I’m very glad to see that these amendments are here. They don’t go as far as I would have liked them to have gone, but certainly it’s going to address a gap in our services for youth, which has been a concern for Members since 2010 when we did the review of the Child and Family Services Act in the 16th Assembly.

I think it is going to improve our services. It will also bring us in line with being lawful. We were basically contravening the rights of youth by not having a provision in our act. So, I’m very glad to see that this is coming forward.

I spoke in the reading of the report about kinship care and this was a term that sort of came to committee through our discussions and deliberations on the bill and on changes that we wanted to see in the bill. I think it’s indicative of the premise that certainly I would like to see and I think committee would like to see on how children are cared for when they need to be removed from their family. It should be our guiding principle that the child stays within the community but also within the extended family or with someone who is very close to the family as opposed to removing them from the family altogether. We started calling it kinship care. It includes grandparents; and many, many times grandparents in our territory take over the maintenance and the care of the children when their own children can’t look after the grandchildren. So, right now it’s very difficult for grandparents to do that. Many do, but they don’t get the support that they need from the department and we need to ensure, when we enact the provisions of this particular act, that we have in mind the child needs to stay with the family and extended family.

When we were travelling and doing public hearings in the communities, I have to say that we heard a great deal of scepticism from residents who were commenting on the amendments to Bill 47 and just on the Child and Family Services Act and programs in general. Things have been broken, so to speak, for a very long time and the people that spoke to us were people that had been involved in the system and the system had not treated them well or had not afforded them an opportunity to keep their children or to treat their children properly, or in the case of grandparents they weren’t able to look after their children without having to basically put themselves into poverty in order to do it. So, there was a lot of scepticism because of their past experience that these improvements to the act were actually going to have some effect. So, I urge the department to try to break that scepticism down, try to ensure that the act, with these changes, shows people that we are well meaning and we can succeed; we can keep children in the home in the community with their extended family.

We spent a lot of time, as well, in committee talking about mediation and I feel, and I think committee feels as well, very strongly that mediation should be used to the utmost before the situation goes to court and the child needs to be apprehended through the court process. We suggested an amendment, to which the Minister did not concur. I’ll talk a bit about that when we get to that clause, but it is important that we, as much as possible, avoid going to court, avoid apprehension and that as much as possible we use mediation to solve the differences between the family and the child or the family and other members of the family.

Child and family services committees were a focus of discussion as well. The act has mandated child and family services committees since it was first written and they haven’t worked. A number of times, certainly in the public hearing, I asked the Minister why we were trying to amend the act and give these committees greater jobs, greater power, so to speak, when they haven’t worked for some 10 or 15 years. So, I want to urge the Minister… I think there is a willingness on the part of the Minister and department to certainly look at child and family services committees and removing them from the act. I want to urge the Minister to do that. There are other ways and there are different jurisdictions in Canada but also different jurisdictions in the world that have different ways of doing the same sort of thing that a child and family services committee would do. Sometimes they’re called Family Group Conferences, which would be, I think, similar to a child and family services committee but it would involve people that are directly related to the child as opposed to another member of the community. So, I urge the department to look at that. I don’t think we need to have it in legislation to employ that sort of an approach to dealing with a child in a particular situation, or a family in a situation.

Lastly, I’d like to just comment, as well, on the collaboration that committee and the department had on this particular bill. It was very similar to Bill 44 yesterday. We went back and forth. We tried to understand where each side was coming from and we then put forward a number of amendments, most of which were agreed to and I think, like a lot of the bills that we’ve reported on in this sitting in the last number of days and weeks, these bills have been made better for the fact that we collaborated and that we worked together to make a better bill. As I said yesterday, I hope that this is something that continues, that it’s sort of a mindset that is going to set in and is going to continue as we deal with bills going forward. Thank you.