Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be supporting the motion to have a review on health and social services within the Territories. The reason I will be supporting the motion is that in the bureaucracy at the headquarters, regional and community levels there seems to be an attitude problem by people who have positions of authority, and this has a ripple effect down to the social workers. Like it or not,
attitudes change because, in essence, you control your clients, you control what they do, you control them as to even when to say you have to come to the office at a certain hour, like 3:00 p.m. or 9:30 in the morning. Like it not, the clients have to go there and be present. A lot of these attitudes have to change.
The values and beliefs of the non-native social workers are not in line with our values and beliefs as native people. I think that equality has to be looked at, treating everybody as human beings, not as a number when you come to the office. During my campaign in Coppermine and Cambridge Bay, many of the clients had indicated that they were not satisfied with the services that are being provided by the social workers. I was a social worker at one time and I enjoyed what I was doing until I got burned out. You have to be almost a super-human being to be a social worker because everything is dumped on your lap on a daily basis. You figure you can have a night off with your family and the next thing you know somebody knocks on your door with a problem and you have to act on it right away. You are there to serve the people. Many times there are people in there who are very insensitive to helping people the way they should.
As Ms. Mike said, I think it is intertwined with education. But when you really have total control about one way of living, that person in the end is not going to have any self-esteem. Their programs are not in place to get our people off their seats. There is nothing in them to be really independent. Many years ago everybody went on the land hunting and trapping and we had our own independence, we were independent from the government structure. But since the government has come into existence in the NWT everybody moved to all the large settlements and that in itself took away the independence of being happily involved, rearing your children the way you are supposed to. But now we are unable to do that because there are not enough jobs for the whole community.
Aftercare Is Important
It is going to take an extra department or something to realize we have a major problem. We talk about development, we talk about many things, but the minute we speak about social problems in the NWT, we have a tendency to chuck it because it costs too much money to make a study. But if we put a good study together that is made by this House or by an independent group of people, I think solutions will fall into place so that we can resolve these problems. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.