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Mr. Speaker, the auditor general's devastating report on child and family services is behind many of the failures identified is a growing staffing crisis fueled by frontline worker burnout and turnover leaving vulnerable children to fall through the cracks which widen with each vacancy which is as high as 34 percent. That crisis has been raised in audit after audit, and it points to an inescapable truth. The government's focus on financial incentives as a fix-all for recruitment continues to miss the mark. Three-quarters of frontline staff would not be operating above the department's 11 case cap, and nearly a quarter would not be carrying more than 30 cases if those solutions were working.

This is not just an administrative failure. It is a human resource crisis that has already led to staff missing mandatory monthly wellness checks for 91 percent of children in care.

Last week I raised these concerns, and consistent with the approach of her predecessors, the Minister's response did not address excessive caseloads or workloads standards. Instead, she returned to housing shortages and national recruitment pressures failing to engage with the fact that her department can't even retain workers in the first place.

We know we can address the needs of social workers. In the United Kingdom and Australia, governments are moving beyond rhetoric and taking concrete action with mandatory 20 percent caseload reductions for early career social workers and automated workload tracking introduced to signal when a regional office reaches unsafe capacity. Yet here in the NWT, health and social services has never actually assessed the financial and human resources required to deliver these services despite being called to do so since 2010.

My question to the Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Speaker, is clear: When will she stand up for social workers and the families who depend on them and commit to codified caseload caps and structured workload protections for frontline workers? When will she stand up for the social workers? Thank you.