Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Justice. I want to commend him and the work that his community have been doing in terms of making all of these drug busts and bootlegging busts in the communities; actually, more involved with the Not Us! campaign and empowering our residents to speak up in the communities and get justice where it needs to be. I commend the hard work that the department is doing with this program. Specifically to the Not Us! program, I believe it is probably in its third year now of running.
I just want to ask the Minister, with the success of this program, is the Minister going to be allocating any new dollars in the future for this program. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Minister of Justice, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Not Us! program is actually quite a successful program. We have it in 20 out of the 33 communities. It starts with a $10,000 start-up and a $5,000 ongoing fee or ongoing allowance to help maintain the program. Right now we have enough money in the budget to cover the communities and there is no plan to increase the allocation. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I was going to ask how many communities are receiving funding and the Minister answered that. We have 13 other communities that can potentially have alcohol and drug-related problems. I want to know – and the Minister did state that he has enough funding to cover the communities that we have now – what about these 13 communities that continue to have these issues. How is he going to address those issues if he’s not committing any other funding?
Can the Minister let me know, and let the government know, and people in these other 13 communities, how is he going to address empowering the residents to speak up specifically for the Not Us! program in these 13 communities? Does he have a plan to address them? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, as I indicated, the program starts off with a $10,000 initial payout and then $5,000 in subsequent years. Because we haven’t had all 33 communities come on at one time, they have been coming at a staggered approach, the budget that we had is, actually, we are able to use that to cover the $10,000 where a few communities start in a year and then the rest are $5,000. So we actually have enough money to maintain them. Right now, as of January 13th, we have three more communities who have indicated a desire to start a Not Us! campaign. That is Fort Simpson, Norman Wells and Tuktoyaktuk. Currently, they don’t have programs, but they’ve expressed an interest and we’re going to move forward with them to get them started up. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I look forward to seeing reports on how successful this program is. Is the Minister going to be doing a report on this Not Us! program? If so, when will the standing committee see the report on the Not Us! program and the effectiveness of this program, as I am sure did help in a lot of the statements that the Minister said earlier? Will we be seeing a report? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, the department is actually currently developing an evaluation framework to assess the success of the campaign and to inform future direction on the program. I don’t have a timeline for it, but I will commit to getting you some additional information during this sitting so that we can have an idea when that evaluation framework will be in place and when we can actually expect to see results. Of course, I am happy to share any results that we come forward with, with committee and with the Member. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Being one of the volunteers that helped start up the Not Us! campaign in Inuvik and get the funding for it, I know how successful this program can be in empowering our residents, our students, our teachers, everybody that works with children and works in the community. Specifically, there is a very successful program called the Lights On Program that happens that we do in Inuvik but we don’t have the funding to keep it on or provide a safe environment for students in the school.
Would the Minister look at specific funding for the Lights On Program outside of the Not Us! funding? A lot of the committees are using the Not Us! funding for that specific program which is very successful as well. Can the Minister let me know if he would be looking at allocating specific funding for the Lights On Program? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I’m not familiar with that particular program, but I would love to sit down with the Member and have him educate me on the program. As far as funding goes, it’s hard to commit funding when I have no idea what the program is. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Member for Deh Cho, Mr. Nadli.
