Sandy Lee

I do appreciate the Member’s questions and I do appreciate that these are of concern to us. I am a little concerned that what we are talking about here may go into clinical decisions that our health care professionals make by whatever knowledge they have or the legislation or policy, so this is a very complex issue. I think the better thing for me to do is just to undertake to get the information for the Members and provide them with the information.

I do want to say that they are governed by legislation, so we need to get to those. I do share the Member’s concerns about improving what we are...

I might have to ask my staff here to get me the details, but we run the Small Community Shelter Program, that is for $250,000 and then we have another program under a different name where we help our people to be relocated or go back to communities they came from sometimes. That is a separate funding for $200,000, but I need to revisit the name of that program. These are the two that I can think of right now, other than O and M funding support that we provide to lots of different NGOs.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We’ve discussed this and we commit that I am giving it full consideration and I will be communicating with the committee. Thank you.

I will ask the deputy minister to give more details, but just to explain to the Members here, under the Foundation for Change, there is a work item there to review mental health programming. I was advised, after the deputy minister came on board, when she looked at all of the programs and we identified right away that this mental health program needed to be looked at very closely with a view of improving that and restructuring that, so we have undertaken those actions. I don’t know the process is in terms of getting the terms of reference reviewed and such. I don’t think that we do that for...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am not familiar with the details of what the Member is suggesting. I would have to assume that was something that a physician might have done, but I will have to get more information from the Member and get back to him.

Mr. Chairman, yes.

Mr. Chairman, as the Member knows, that suggestion is one of a number of proposals that have been given to me that are under consideration. We are analyzing them and we will get back to members in committee on how and what options we have to make those happen. I am going to have to answer that in that way.

I do want to add a couple of things. The Member is right that the current legislation allows us to have children and family services committees. It is actually one of the pioneering and hallmark of this legislation that is different than many other legislations across the country. I was not...

I don’t believe we get separate funding for implementing a strategic document. There will be programs that we will have to go through a business plan process or we would have to do it internally, thank you.

I’ve already agreed to do that on many occasions and I’d be happy to meet with Members and the committee. The example that the Member presented here is a good example. I want to state that the department and government took every recommendation very, very seriously. We approached it in a very positive way. Our responses are about how do we make this happen. The Member raised a question about the way the law is right is it’s implicit. We would like to make it explicit. The example he gave is under section 7 of the act. It already states very explicitly that child protection has to, it must, it...

Mr. Chairman, we do support multiyear funding for NGOs. Not all NGOs are able or equipped to do that. We consider the multiyear funding arrangement on an NGO-by-NGO basis. We are currently reviewing our funding arrangement with NGOs in the department. Thank you.