Sandy Lee

Mr. Chairman, the Member knows that our budget, every cent and every dollar is allocated so I am not sure where he thinks that I could come up with $1.4 million to expand this program within this budget. I know that the Members have suggested that I look at $12 million under Child Protection Program but a lot of them are under contracts already. I would be happy to provide the Member with detailed information if he had an idea about where to move the money. I could tell you right now that even one of these two move it will have a consequence.

Mr. Speaker, I talked to the chair of the standing...

Mr. Chairman, I don’t want to read too much into it, but is the Member suggesting something that we could move around within the budget? If so, I would like to hear what he would like to take out in order to pay for what he thinks is important.

Mr. Chairman, prevention and early intervention, we do that in many of our program areas, but in specifically for healthy families, the Member knows that we are proposing to expand the programming to Inuvik and Fort Simpson. That is part of this main estimate. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, I’m not going to bring in any witnesses.

Mr. Chair, the Member can be as confused as he lets himself be, so I’m not sure if I can help him with that. The fact is, and when I say that we’re going to proceed, we’re going to present this as part of the next business plan, it doesn’t mean that I’m committing the next government. We are still going to be in this Assembly as we review the next business plan. The Member’s been here for three years. He knows what the process is. We’ve outlined in our reply to the committee a number of competing priorities that the Members have presented to us and the Member knows already that the business...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m not familiar in detail with what Justice has proposed. I’ve had a look at it, but I don’t know exactly how it’s funded, so I’m not able to compare.

But I’d like to just reiterate that the department is and has always been committed to working to set up these committees and the one that we are closest to getting some results is Fort McPherson. If the Member’s wish is that we continue to work in that and use whatever resources we have within and the staff we have, the management and the authorities to do that, then we will continue to do that because that’s part of...

Our commitment is to bring that forward into the next business plan process. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to reiterate that if the committee is happy or it is acceptable to them, that we continue working on setting up these committees as the way we have been and do our utmost to get them set up, I am happy to accept that and we will continue to work on that. We will be obviously using existing resources to do that, but I was under the assumption that the committee wanted us to get more aggressive about it. This is why we came up with a plan. I would like to ask Dana to give you details on how we arrived at these numbers. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I responded to the chair of Standing Committee on Social Programs on that issue on February 25th and indicated that we will implement that.

Mr. Chair, I think the challenge we have here is a timing issue, because the standing committee report came out in October. By then we had gone through the business plan review, the budget was wrapped up in January and presented to the House in February. There was not enough time or space in the budget to incorporate as much as the Members thought that we should. We did accept many of the recommendations but there are pending resources.

The second thing is why don’t you just take 60 kids out of the system and use that money. I’d have to say if any of those 60 kids could be taken out, they...