Glen Abernethy

The Member is right; there have been some other courses as part of that. There is an eight-week course that’s been delivered three times for men who use violence through the DVTO court. If the Member wishes, I’m happy to share the information with him on a bit of an analysis of the programs, how many we have run, what kind of results, what kind of turnout we had, and I will share that with committee as well.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We have a full-time lawyer, a poverty lawyer, what is referred to as a poverty lawyer within our facility. This isn’t one of our legal aid lawyers. This was a different position. They are doing a significant amount of work and doing a lot of important work for residents all over the Northwest Territories. Some pretty basic things to some more complicated things. Every ounce of feedback that we get back from this position that this person is in, is that they are adding significant value to people who can’t afford these types of services.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’ll try to be a little quicker on this one. I’ve already answered this question last week when we talked about other changes that the Members were looking for in the Residential Tenancies Act.

Six recommendations were put forward by the rental officer. We’ve committed to doing an analysis of those recommendations as well as the recommendations to find a hammer, if you will. We will review those. We are going to bring those back to committee in the fall, an opportunity to have a discussion and set some direction on how we want to move forward.

The Member is right; one...

It does give us more of a planning cooperation relationship with the RCMP. One of the things that we’ve been doing is the RCMP has been going in to actually set up individualized policing plans for every community, and we’ve been working with the individual communities. For instance, when we went to Tsiigehtchic and Colville, we actually sat down with the leadership, the commanding officer and I, and then the commanding officer continued after I left. We had conversations about exactly how we can provide, or how they can provide coverage that meets their needs. Even after having some of those...

Madam Chair, the Member is correct. I am wrong. The protection of family violence falls under this section. This is where the money is housed.

With respect to those 19 recommendations, I actually had an opportunity to meet with the coalition last week. We had an opportunity to sit down and look at the 19 recommendations. Without minimizing the importance of the 19 recommendations, they indicated they are all important. They have indicated to me and others that they want a priority put on three, particularly a social media campaign, a program for men who use violence, and community outreach. I...

Thank you, Madam Chair. In addition to the obvious review of the Legal Aid Act, which is going to hopefully give us some new direction on how to provide these types of services, the department did actually increase the legal aid division in both 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 to a total of three lawyers. It took a bit longer to fill those positions than anybody would have liked to have had. Really, those lawyers are really only getting up to speed now, compared to what existed before when much of the backlog had occurred.

We’re optimistic with these three new lawyers, plus the new one that will...

We’re absolutely confident in the numbers that we have. The study was done in 2009 but it did actually take into account the addition of the new buildings such as the Gallery Building. All those buildings were taken into consideration.

We’ve looked at the numbers again. We’ve looked at the Class A and B buildings, the ones that we actually utilize, and we’re confident that the rates will stay the same.

There are a lot of good things about this building. One of the things about this building is that over the lifecycle of this building it is going to save the Government of the Northwest...

I’m going to go to Ms. Schofield for some specifics on that, but I believe that there is a process, yes.

That is the money I just mentioned, the federal money that sunsetted and we hope, we believe it is going to be coming back. If it comes back, you will see it come back by way of a supp.

The Member has certainly hit an area that we know there are some weaknesses, without question. We don’t provide medical terminology training to the interpreters. It’s an area that we need to find a way to find some improvements on. It’s going to take money, money we don’t happen to have, which is one of our biggest challenges.

As far as how interpreters travel with us, we tend to pick interpreters up at site at the location we’re going to, rather than necessarily having them travel with us. We try to find people who have had experience over time, coming back, coming back, coming back, coming...