Thanks, Mr. Chair. We do agree with this recommendation in principle. As part of the Quality Improvement Plan, the department has already committed to developing a set of key indicators. That is action 1.5 in the Quality Improvement Plan that has been shared. The set of performance indicators are currently under development. Once completed, the department will include these in future business plans as well as the annual report of the director of Child and Family Services where they align with the scope of the plan, so they will be made public through those mechanisms.

The department will be seeking some legal advice to see to what extent the Child and Family Services Act allows for tracking client-centered outcomes with the consideration for privacy and confidentiality requirements. What I mean by that, for example, is tracking some outcomes would require linking Child and Family Services data to other related measures such as hospitalization data, immunization data, and those types of things. This would also require the identification of common variables to link these data sets; things like child name, date of birth, health care number, et cetera. So if a health care number is required, as is often the case for hospitalization data, the CFS system would need to track this information through the Matrix NWT. Currently, the healthcare card number is not collected through the system, which could add some complication, which is why we agree with this recommendation and principle as opposed to straight agreement, because we have some work to do to determine whether or not we can actually do it to the degree that I believe the Members want based on the recommendation.

For other indicators related to measuring the success of youths once they have left or aged out, for example, things like employment or employment training, educational attainment, whether they are actually eligible to enrol in college, whether they are eligible to enter trade programs, these types of things, the department would have to verify with legal counsel. If the Child and Family Services Act actually permits following children once their files are closed or locked for reporting purposes, once that is confirmed, we would need to go through what information is needed for data linkages.

So while we don't agree that there is value in this to help make evidence-based decisions, we are not 100 percent sure that we can collect the data in the way the Members would like us to, so our commitment is that we will do the work to figure out if we can, and if we can, we will. If we can't, we will certainly explain to committee what our challenges are and why we are unable, so that is why we agree with this in a principle as opposed to just a straight accept. We have more work to do. Thank you, Mr. Chair.