Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Ms. Schofield, Ms. Haener, welcome to the Chamber.
Committee, we’re going to begin today’s deliberations with some general comments. With that, with our conventional protocol, I will allow Members to go through one time for 10 minutes and I will allow the Minister to respond. If I could say to the Minister, you do not need to respond to each individual question within the parameter from the Members. Maybe aggregate your responses accordingly. With that, we’ll open up to general comments. Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister Ramsay. It was very interesting to hear your opening remarks to this year’s budget. I’m very pleased to see there are going to be some initiatives that we have been working on for some time and certainly bringing them to reality within the years to come.
Mr. Ramsay has indicated that Justice is responsible for providing support to the needs of the people in the Northwest Territories, and like I have made comments to the Minister of Health, there are communities without RCMP members. Over the years I’ve been a Member, I have a file that tells me all the reasons why you aren’t yet having members in our communities. I certainly don’t want to bring that out right now, but just that if you could correct me later on, my understanding was it was 10 or 11, but I could be wrong too. We do not have RCMP in our small communities, and I’m going to ask you, too, Mr. Ramsay, along with the Minister of Health, that I’d like to see a plan with all this money coming to the Northwest Territories through various avenues, is to start looking at where and how and when and all this good stuff, bringing a business plan to us on this side to let us know that this is what we’re doing, Cabinet, as government, to put RCMP members in our small communities. There has to be some special consideration given just like with the Minister of Health.
There are no full-time nurses in our communities, so if you’re really, truly looking and want to follow that vision, that belief, responsive to the needs of the people we serve, well, there are communities without RCMP members, and we’re not being responsible to their needs.
I’ve also heard through the previous Minister of how the communities are being served, which is once a month or three or four times a month. In today’s society, that doesn’t seem to be very helpful for us to not have RCMP in our communities. I just wanted to raise that with the Minister.
I know this is an O and M budget; however, it’s important, because I don’t see anything in the operations and maintenance that has to go inside with the infrastructure budget, but at least I could have seen some type of O and M planning studies or some kind of business case why we need to put RCMP in our small communities. The same with Health. I’m getting, I guess, a little bit frustrated that year after year the department comes to us, but they seem to forget that there are communities in the Northwest Territories that do not have RCMP members full-time, but they always seem to have really good reasons why they aren’t doing it, but they seem to be okay with other projects. That doesn’t fly with me.
I’m going to ask Mr. Ramsay if he could show some strong leadership and say, if there are 10 or 11 without RCMP, this is what we’re going to do. As a Member here for 10 years, I have not yet seen a plan, but also being here, I’ve heard of a lot of reasons why they can’t do it. Show me one good reason why they should be putting it in those communities, not 10,000 reasons why they can’t do it. That’s the responsive needs to our communities. If you go into any one of our communities that do not have RCMP members, that is not a very good thing to have in today’s society, but they certainly have a lot of money for other things.
I argued a couple years ago with the then previous Minister of Justice how many dollars we were putting in to put in a fence at the correctional centre here. I don’t know where that kind of thinking comes from, but that’s what we’ve got in the Department of Justice, putting money in a fence to keep inmates in but you can’t put money into a community for crime prevention and safety to put RCMP members in our community. I just don’t know where the senior management team is and what they’re thinking. We are the legislators. We should be the ones that are driving this initiative. I don’t know, but I’m a little bit confused on this issue, so I’m going to put that challenge to the Minister and to the Cabinet.
I’d like to see a business case of putting RCMP in the communities without RCMP. I remember one time we had an incident here in Yellowknife and just like that they had an RCMP assigned to a school. Quick, like that, but not in our communities. Something’s wrong. Something is terribly wrong. I think it’s time our communities deserved some respect and some justice and say we’re going to do this for the communities. That’s what I’d like to see.
I applaud the Minister for taking on some new initiatives because we worked on them together as the pilot case. I mean, that’s a good thing. Our Members pushed it over here. We have some new initiatives. The Minister of Justice and I have been working hard in our communities to get on-the-land treatment programs, corrections programs, and it’s up to our people to come up to the plate and say yes, we would like to have on-the-land programs. I know the Minister has been very supportive in that area to get inmates out on the land and to do their time out there, and to be educated, to get well and to get back into their communities. I see that as a positive step working towards the wellness of our communities.
The other thing I’d like to point out before I leave the floor is the justice system. If we are going to be responsive to the needs of our people, they have to be properly trained to interpret the legalities and the terminologies that the court system uses. We have to support our language, speaking First Nation mother tongue, and that court has to recognize this. This is an English law coming into an Aboriginal community, but now you’ve got to have our people be trained properly to understand justice as it’s meant to be, so we have to have some funding resources to do this. I think that we deserve this in our communities.
Again, I put a challenge to the Minister and his staff here. Look for money, train our people in our communities, the ones that want to go through the court system using their language. It should be a no-brainer. The days of going through the system without properly trained legal translators are over. I ask the Minister to consider, with the limited budget that we have, how do we do this in our small communities such as Colville Lake or Fort Good Hope. It’s a lot of work for us. I mean, I’m only talking two communities, but I think the Minister knows and he’s up to the challenge. I think he’s new in this, it’s only four months, but I’d like him to know that some basic things need to be put in place and look at where we need to step back and see where we need to correct our system but are meeting the basic needs of our justice in policing, corrections, or in the court service. What are some of the things that we need to do to ensure that we are responsive to the needs of the people of the Northwest Territories.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. General comments. Mr. Blake.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a few comments for the Minister along the same lines of policing. I know the community of Fort McPherson has received an extra RCMP to manage Tsiigehtchic, and as the Minister committed to having one of the officers overnighting in Tsiigehtchic, I just have to ask the question of funding. Has the detachment in Fort McPherson received extra funding to implement that? That is one of my major concerns. I know the Minister is willing to work with the Minister of Housing to line up a place to stay, but I look forward to that and I know we are a ways off from a detachment, but I think we are in the right direction. I look forward to working with the Minister, moving forward to that. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Blake. Moving on with general comments, I have Mr. Nadli.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The comments that I wanted to make are surrounding the recent and very public cases involving harvesting of either wood or else some caribou. This goes to the heart of treaty rights and Aboriginal title. I understand there is a process to the courts and we have to respect the due process; however, I want to find out, in terms of the Department of Justice dealing with treaty rights and Aboriginal title, with the understanding of governments with the way that they are usually structured is that there is a divide between the judiciary plus the executive, and at the same time the legal case precedents in the instances for specific rights are recognized and affirmed through the courts. I wanted to get an understanding of how, perhaps, the department is playing a role in terms of ensuring that there are guiding principles that the department upholds when dealing with those rights. I wanted to understand that.
The other point that I wanted to make is in terms of culture and languages. It is very important to the communities that I serve that we recognize that there are different cultures in communities, mainly the First Nations culture and, at the same time, languages and their specific needs. It is important that we try to provide a service so that when a person finds themselves in a legal circumstance, that language translation is available so that people are treated fairly in terms of the judicial process and that they don’t feel victimized through the whole process when experiencing that there is a lack of language services available to them.
The other point that I wanted to make is I wanted to understand the Department of Justice mandate and role in ensuring that our RCMP, in terms of how they provide services, I understand there has been work in terms of trying to engage communities and developing policing plans. I think it has been noted that our communities, especially along the highways, need to be worked closely with, ensuring that the local leadership and citizens have a role in terms of developing their annual policing plans. I hope that will continue as well.
Those where just some points that I wanted to make. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Nadli. Continuing on with general comments, I have Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to briefly touch on our RCMP services in my riding. I think, particularly in Fort Simpson, I am pleased how they interact in the community, especially with the new organization for Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. They really came out and pitched in, helped out with the kickoff of that event, and I am pleased to see that. I am also pleased to see that they continue to do drinking and driving. There were 11 charges in January, which is good to see. It sends a message to the community that we take this very seriously in the Northwest Territories. When it comes down to the small communities like Fort Liard that has a small detachment, every time I visit there, community members want that kind of involvement and that kind of, I guess it is intervention, or catching the drunk drivers and, most particularly, the bootleggers that cross the border from BC. I don’t know if that is part of their strategy to do check stops across the border. Fort Liard residents often say there are not enough check stops at the border. Perhaps they are doing it but not too visibly, so not everybody is seeing it. I just urge the Justice department to continue with that.
Another incident is search and rescues. I am really pleased how the RCMP steps up and gets involved and hosts whole community meetings, especially with when we lost the late Billy Cholo in Fort Simpson. The RCMP was front and foremost interacting with the community, with the leadership, trying to resolve that situation the best that they could.
There is something that is still on my plate, of course, is to return nursing to the community of Wrigley. Part of that process was to have RCMP services there. We have dedicated RCMP officers in Fort Simpson, but it is the long-term goal, of course, to get a detachment back into Wrigley. I can still see the business case where, with the onset of development in the Sahtu in the long term, Wrigley will require extra policing and extra medical services, such as the case as it was in the late ‘70s when they had nursing and police services in Wrigley. I have been pressing this House that that is the case coming up once again, and hopefully, I know that when it came to infrastructure, at one point it was largely federal infrastructure that created holding cells, et cetera, so I think that with recent changes that it belongs now to the Government of the Northwest Territories. I don’t know if the Minister wants to comment on that, the long-term capital planning for establishing catchments in a small community like Wrigley. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. I will turn this over now to the Minister for an opportunity to reply to general comments. Mr. Ramsay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the Members for sharing their general comments with me. There are a few areas of concern that overlapped most Members.
I guess what I would like to start out with, and I know was raised by a number of Members, was policing in smaller communities and the need to look at services. We do provide services, especially a community like Gameti or Wrigley, Tsiigehtchic are serviced by the RCMP.
Just to put it into perspective, today there are 12 communities in the Northwest Territories that do not have a detachment. Three of those communities are within a 30-minute drive of a major centre with a detachment. The other nine – I could list them off, there are nine other communities – the cost of establishing a detachment in one of these communities is anywhere between $11 million and $12 million, an upfront capital cost. So if you look at nine communities, that is close to $100 million in capital expenditure. Also, on an ongoing basis we would be looking at somewhere around $40 million to operate nine new detachments in the Northwest Territories, so the cost is prohibitive today.
Moving forward, I think we have to ensure that we are providing services to those communities. We have had some success. I know the Member for Mackenzie Delta talked about RCMP members that are dedicated to the community of Tsiigehtchic, travelling from Fort McPherson into Tsiigehtchic and overnighting in the community, and we believe that is a very positive step in the right direction. We hope to have RCMP members in the community eight nights out of the month. We are working toward that goal.
I know the Member for Nahendeh mentioned the situation in Wrigley and maybe that’s a model. I’ll go back to the department and to the RCMP and discuss whether or not we can have RCMP members look at accommodations in Wrigley so that they can be more present in the community on a monthly basis. That’s something that we’ll certainly take a look at.
Mr. Yakeleya also talked about on-the-land programs. We did have an RFP that went out late last year. We didn’t have any successful proponents that came forward. Right now we’re regrouping at the department. We’re going to see if we can take another shot at this and perhaps look at another RFP, or if there are interested groups, I know the Member and I had talked at great length about some proponents in the Sahtu that were interested in operating an on-the-land program in the Sahtu but we didn’t receive a proposal from them. We don’t want to close the door on that. I think there is some opportunity there and we certainly would look forward to working with groups, whether they’re in the Sahtu or other regions around the Northwest Territories, to look at on-the-land programming in the Northwest Territories.
A couple of Members also talked about interpreters and the availability of interpreters. We have the resources available to us so that we can provide that service to people. If Members want more details on how those resources can be available to community members, that’s something that we have and we’d be happy to help Members with that.
The one other issue I wanted to touch on and Mr. Nadli had brought it up, we support the government when it comes to legal advice and legal support to various departments. We don’t get involved in ongoing court cases. That’s something where there’s a clear distinction between the judiciary and the executive branches of government, and that’s always been the way it is and we don’t involve ourselves in court cases.
The other item is policing plans. We’ve had a great deal of success in working with communities on policing plans. I think it’s a perfect opportunity for the RCMP to meet with the community leadership to go over the needs of the community on an ongoing basis and it’s something that has been successful. We’ll try to continue that practice and ensure that those are in place for communities around the Northwest Territories.
I thank MLA Menicoche for his accolades to the RCMP in Fort Simpson and in Nahendeh. I know many times the RCMP are really involved in the communities they’re present in, and we certainly look forward to their involvement.
As we go forward, I know they’re front and centre on any search and rescue here in the Northwest Territories and we appreciate the job that the RCMP are doing for us here in the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Is committee prepared to go into detail?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Committee, we are in your main estimates binder at 9-7. This is the summary which we will defer up until conclusion of consideration of the individual activities. I’ll get you to turn to 9-8, Justice, information item, infrastructure investment summary. Any questions?
Agreed.
Seeing none, 9-9, Justice, information item, revenue summary. Any questions?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Page 9-10, Ms. Bisaro.
Sorry, Mr. Chair, I couldn’t get back to page 9 quick enough. Could we revert to page 9?
Does committee agree to go back to 9-9?
Agreed.
Ms. Bisaro, we’ve concluded that one, so if you want to capture that in another… We have concluded 9-9. Thank you. Page 9-10, Justice, information item, active position summary. Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Under regional allocation we have 475 employees allocated here. Would the department be able to break out, out of its individual regions, how many of the positions are funded and unfunded? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Mr. Ramsay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Those positions are all funded. Thank you.
Thank you for that. Over and above this, how many casual positions does the department carry? Thank you.
I’ll go to Ms. Schofield for that response, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Ms. Schofield.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The department’s active positions are such as they are, 475. We do have relief positions that are not part of that in our correctional facilities, and off the top of my head I can’t tell you how many that is, but there are relief positions in our facilities that cover off our correctional staff when they are not able to work because of sick leave or other leave. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Schofield. Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you. Is there any commitment to finding out how many there are of those relief positions, and furthermore, what do they cost? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister Ramsay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We can get that information for the Member. Thank you.
Thank you. I consider also what they cost as part of that request.
Where does the funding come for these positions? Where does it come from? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. For the 475, it’s through the main estimates and for the other information the Member wants, we’ll detail that in our response to the Member. Thank you.
Thank you. Is there any specific allocation for the unfunded positions and where would I find that, on what page? Thank you.
Mr. Hawkins, if I can get you to repeat that question, please.
Is there any specific allocation for these unfunded positions, and if so, what page would I find that on?
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. For that, we’ll go to Ms. Schofield.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have funding in our correctional facility appropriation for relief positions. It’s included in the compensation and benefits component of the budget. Thank you.
What page would that be on if this isn’t the appropriate page?
That funding would be included in the correctional services budget on page 9-31.
Thank you. Over and above the relief positions as noted, which Ms. Schofield just said would be found on 9-31, are there any other unfunded positions within the department, and if so, where and how many?
The Department of Justice doesn’t have unfunded positions. We may have positions where somebody has double filled the position because somebody is on a maternity leave or on a transfer assignment. The relief positions are actually funded, just for clarification. Thank you.
Out of the 475 positions, how many are presently filled and how many are empty? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister Ramsay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think that information was provided to committee about two weeks ago. We could perhaps bring it back. I’ll go to Ms. Haener, but I think the level of detail the Member is looking for was supplied to P and P two weeks ago.
Thank you, Minister Ramsay. Ms. Haener.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. As of October 31st the department had 42 vacant positions to be staffed. I can provide an update on the status of those positions as of the last week and a half or so. Twenty of those have been filled, 18 are still vacant and are waiting to be staffed, one is an employee’s home position who is on a transfer assignment, two are legislative counsel positions of which the funding is part of devolution implementation and those will be sunsetting at the end of this year and then will be deactivated, one is a legal translator position which we are intending to inactivate. The funding for that originally was to be part of devolution, but the work plan changed in relation to that position. Of the 18 positions that are still vacant, eight are here in Yellowknife, one is in the Deh Cho, six are in the Beaufort-Delta and three are in the South Slave.
Thank you, Ms. Haener. Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you for that. Do we have an approximation of what those positions, in summary, would be valued at? Do we have an average assessment of how long those positions have been vacant, referring back to the 42? I’m glad to hear that 26 have been filled. Furthermore, have any opened up since the October 31st snapshot had been taken? Thank you.
