Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In follow-up to my Member’s statement today about community policing and police presence in all of our communities, I would like to direct my questions to the Minister of Justice. Communities in southern Canada have their own police force. Tell me again, if I didn’t already know, why the Northwest Territories, if not RCMP, cannot have some kind of policing presence in our communities currently that do not have a police presence.
When we have no police presence, it falls to other people to fill in that gap. It falls to band managers and people who are respected in the community and it puts a great deal of stress on other people and it is not an ideal circumstance. I would like to ask that as my first question. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Minister of Justice, Mr. Ramsay.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We continue to work with communities on providing a service to the communities. There was the Aboriginal Constable Program. We didn’t get enough applicants. The program was supposed to run at Depot in Regina in 2013. There weren’t enough applicants. That program has been reworked. There is an intake that’s supposed to happen early, I believe, in 2015. We are hoping to have a couple of applicants from the Northwest Territories enter that program.
We have to also look at opportunities with each community. We try to make a policing model for each community in the Northwest Territories and make things work by working with community leaders. We’ve had some success in Tsiigehtchic, we’re going to try to get members to stay in the community overnight. I mentioned yesterday, in response to some other questions during the mains review of Justice, that there are other communities here in the Northwest Territories where that may be a possibility. We will continue to look at creative ways to try to get more police presence into every community in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
The Minister mentioned an Aboriginal Constable Program for which there was not much interest and that these individuals or candidates would have been able to train at Depot.
My question to the Minister is: Would these Aboriginal constables or these graduates from the Aboriginal Constable Program, would they have been able to offer policing services in communities, stand-alone, without the presence of an RCMP officer? Thank you.
We currently have four of those positions in the Northwest Territories in four different communities across the NWT, but no, they’re there to observe and monitor and act as a liaison with the RCMP and report activity to the RCMP and monitor the situation as it happens. Thank you.
So, I gather from that answer that these constables work in conjunction with existing RCMP detachments. So they do not go to the issue of what I’m talking about here today, and that is communities, the number of communities in the Northwest Territories who currently do not have any police presence. So I’ll ask the Minister, has the department, has our government ever considered some form of auxiliary police department in the Northwest Territories that could be stand-alone outside of the RCMP in these small communities? Thank you.
Thank you. On April 1st of 2012 we signed a new 20-year agreement with the RCMP for services here in the Northwest Territories. We also are working closely with our counterparts in Nunavut and the Yukon on First Nations Policing. It’s a federal program. We’re hoping to have some success by working in a pan-territorial approach to try to get some funding for First Nations policing. We’re hoping for the best with that as well.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Final, short supplementary, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In no way am I suggesting that the contract we have signed with the RCMP is not a good thing for the Northwest Territories. I believe that they provide a wonderful service and that should continue, but because of the regulations that came about, partially due to some of the unfortunate incidents that took place, one of them in Hay River and another one in Nunavut, the rules around having single-member detachments changed greatly. So we are bound by the rules that regulate the RCMP.
I’m not suggesting that the RCMP be replaced in any way. I’m talking about how we can get some form of police presence into the small communities where we currently do not have an RCMP detachment. If that means working with the other territories to come up with another level of policing, then we need to do that. I’d like to ask the Minister for more detail on what that model would look like. Thank you.
Thank you. I agree with the Member. I think it is time to be creative. It’s time to try to find a way to get a police presence in communities across the Northwest Territories. I’d be more than happy to get some additional information for Members on the First Nations policing work that the department is underway with the Yukon government and also with Nunavut. There have been discussions in the past by the former Minister of Justice and discussions will continue into the future. We’ll get that information.
Again, it’s very important that we look at creative ways and means, whether it’s through the Aboriginal Constable Program or First Nations Policing, or opportunities in some of our other communities to overnight RCMP officers in those communities. We have to do everything we can to ensure that there’s a police presence in communities that we can provide a presence in. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. The Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
