Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I spoke about the government’s declaration of May 26th tomorrow for the residential school healing and reconciliation process and I want to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services if his department has been looking at what type of programs within the field of mental health and wellness counselling and other sorts of areas that could support residential school survivors to take…
---Interjection
Continue, Mr. Yakeleya. Sorry about that.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Would the department look at what type of programs are there for residential school survivors and the ones who are also affected by it?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We recognize that a lot of the truth and reconciliation in residential schools have become a very high-profile issue in the government. The department is putting together the action plan that we’re going to be rolling out in the next two years. In addition to that, we have about $6 million, a little over $6 million in the Community Counselling Program. We have one residential treatment facility that’s still operating and we also have about a million dollars or a little over targeted into the communities for aftercare and also for on-the-land programs, if that’s something that the communities are interested in carrying out.
I do look forward to the Minister’s release of that document sometime in the near future and certainly give him support where it’s needed to be. I want to ask the Minister, we do have Nats’ejee K’eh Treatment Program at Hay River Dene Reserve. We have what Mrs. Groenewegen talked about, a facility also maybe being opened up in Hay River. We looked at Inuvik where they have possibly a facility, or even in Fort McPherson. So there are some facilities that are going to be available. I want to ask the Minister if there’s anywhere in that action on addiction or treatment programs, anywhere in the plan of the department where we can possibly slate a residential school treatment program specifically for survivors of residential school.
Within that action plan and also a commitment from the government that we would look at more treatment in existing infrastructure, we will be asking in the action plan that a Minister’s forum be struck on well-respected people within the addictions and mental health field to travel to the communities and see first-hand what is required. We are going to be supporting that forum with a request through a supplementary appropriation of about $300,000 so that they can gather and hear firsthand from the communities what is needed. We believe, from our initial travels, that there is a requirement or a request for some sort of residential treatment in the Beaufort-Delta for residential school survivors.
When we look down the Mackenzie Valley and you look into the communities, we have small communities. In a lot of our small communities probably about 60 to 70 percent of the people who live in our communities have some direct impact of residential schools, so there’s a high need for this. I want to ask the Minister where in his department is there a policy that says that if you, Mr. Yakeleya, want to go to a program for your family and yourself – and I have a lot of brothers and sisters and they had big families too – where in the policy that we can go to the department and say we want to go to this program. Is there a policy that will take a family of four or five and say you’re going, or are we going to have to wait to future time where we could look at this through the action plan that he’s indicated in the next couple of weeks?
Right now the residential treatment that is being offered is individual treatment. They used to have couples treatment, but it was decided by the facility that they would be better off to have individual treatment, gender treatment, actually. Right now we don’t have residential family treatment available, with the exception of something that could occur on the land. It appeared as though in the communities when we travelled and heard first hand that the communities felt that a solution could be to have families, several families, in fact, going out on the land and going to that type of on-the-land treatment with some counsellors on the land, but at this time we don’t have anything as far as family treatment goes unless they go out of the territory.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Your final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Mr. Speaker, the policy of the genocide intentions by the federal government was to take the children away from the family and do that. We’re no different than doing this with this program here, taking people away and looking at treating them in this manner. I think what we’re looking for is a family treatment program. That’s the power and the strength of the people here. I ask the Minister, would he look at this as one possibility, one solution of family treatment programs on the land as a starting point where they start doing the true healing and reconciliation of the suffering that was done of the residential schools.
Mr. Speaker, as part of the action plan and as part of the Ministers’ forum, we want to look at all aspects of treatment and if family treatment is something that’s proposed by many of the communities, then it’s something that we will try to work into our action plan. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
