Mr. Speaker, March is National Social Worker Month, and I would like to thank the social workers in the NWT for the work that they do. I would also like to encourage the social workers in our territory to continue to look at our families under the lens of reconciliation and remind the non-Indigenous social workers who have not grown up in the NWT that our families have been under attack since contact.
The impact of what residential schools did on families, some never even got to live with their families from the ages of five to eighteen. This is evident on their families now as they struggle with parenting and addictions from the trauma that they experienced. Please show compassion for our Indigenous mothers and fathers who, just because they are Indigenous, are in constant fear of losing their children. Some are not even aware that the way that they are living is unacceptable because it's normal and the reality of how they grew up.
Mr. Speaker, the stats are almost 100 percent of children in care are Indigenous in the Northwest Territories, and this saddens me. Our social work program in the NWT was stopped and put under review. This was very concerning as it would decrease the amount of local and Indigenous social workers being trained in the NWT under an Aboriginal lens. I hope that this program will resume with a focus on prevention and not intervention. The more we focus on prevention, the less intervention we will have to do. Then, Mr. Speaker, we can look to a future with less broken families. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.