R.J. Simpson

Thank you. The Member's referring to the previous section that we voted on, court services. And the reason that the positions are distributed that way is that's where the courts are in Yellowknife. The head main court is in Yellowknife. There are court services that operate out of the Hay River courthouse, and there is a court worker in Inuvik as well. And so that would explain the distribution in the previous activity. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, that's hard to predict but we even if we have more, it's highly unlikely that it would be enough to put us close to that full capacity of our facilities. Thank you.

Thank you. In the past few years, we have had some increases in our court officers. Because it is they have been stretched prior to this happening. I'll tell you a tough area to get support in a budget is for administrative positions and, you know, court services are no different. So people want frontline staff. They want money for health care. They don't necessarily want people who work in offices with paper despite the fact that they can you know, some of the work they do is invaluable. So we try to balance where we put our resources, and we try to do the best that we can with what we have...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And no, that is not the policy. It is just the way that we like to do business is by cooperating and communicating. And for the past eight years as I've been an MLA, that has been common practice. In the last government, the Regular Members would actually share the at least the titles of their Member's statements and their questions with Cabinet early in the morning. So it's just we're just all trying to get along here, and we want to make sure that when Members have questions that, as Cabinet, we can provide good answers. We don't know everything, all the ins and outs...

Staff lawyers. There's a higher expenditure on staff lawyers. Thank you.

Thank you. By law, we need to have a youth open and secure custody but we may be able to shut that down and send them to another jurisdiction. We may be able to shut the women's facility down, send them to another jurisdiction or to the youth facility. We could shut down a few more correctional facilities if the Members really wanted to, but that's not what we're doing. We understand that that's a massive impact that we don't want to have on the communities. And this is as I said, this is not an easy decision. And we could keep it open and keep spending that money, or we can try and save that...

Thank you. When there's an influx of money, you can see an influx of crime. When there is an economic collapse, you can see an influx of crime. And so there's correlations in many different ways. I don't think we've seen the dramatic shifts in our economy that we would we could say led to an increase in crime at this point. That being said, I have not confirmed with the stats bureau on any type of correlation that there may be. Thank you.

I'd like to direct that to Mr. Bancroft. Thank you.

Thank you. The GNWT has a staff retention policy in situations like this. The Minister of Finance would be the expert in that on that policy, and so I'd prefer not to comment. But I know that the department will be working with those employees directly as they make their way through this process. Thank you.

Thank you. So I mean, I could answer as the Minister of Justice. It sounds like it might be a much more broad question than that, but there are things like legislation like the SCAN legislation which I guess in Alberta is actually the sheriffs use that legislation quite often. I just saw a story about the sheriffs in Calgary closing down a drug house in Calgary. But, you know, ultimately, it's a public health issue and we need to move towards integrating our services, making them easy to access, and ensuring that they are appropriate. At the end of the day, the solutions are community driven...