Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are addressed to the Minister of Health and Social Services. I want to ask the Minister a few questions in and around the Child and Family Services Act review that was done by the Standing Committee on Social Programs in the 16th Assembly. It was a great deal of work. The Minister is well aware because he was chair of the committee at the time that we did that work.
This is the report that was tabled in the House. It has many recommendations, 73 to be exact. It was tabled on October of 2010. I have to say that I feel, at this point, that we haven’t made much progress on these recommendations. We haven’t made much progress on getting ahead on many of the recommendations that are in the report.
One of the things that the report asks for at the very end, it is almost the last recommendation I think, is for Health and Social Services to develop a strategic plan to deal with the recommendations from this report.
I would like to ask the Minister to provide for me and for the House an update on what the department has been doing, what recommendations he can tell us in regard to the strategic plan, what recommendations have been acted on and where we’re at with that plan. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A lot of the recommendations of the 73 recommendations involve revision to the act itself, the Child and Family Services Act. Our department is acting on some of the recommendations such as the incorporation of the child and family services committees in the communities which are not having much uptake. Also, expanding Healthy Families the quicker the better, it’s directly involved with early childhood development. But the majority of the work that needs to be done would be done after there are amendments to the Child and Family Services Act, and we’re on target to present a legislative proposal on the Child and Family Services Act in 2013. Thank you.
Thanks to the Minister for that. I guess I’d have to disagree with the Minister, I don’t think it’s the majority that are legislative changes. Certainly, there are a lot of changes suggested to legislation and I’m really glad to hear that there will be an LP coming in 2013. That’s this calendar year. So that’s a good thing.
The Minister mentioned one of the actions the department has tried to put into place, and that’s child and family service committees within our communities. I appreciate that there has been some difficulty in getting these committees organized, but I have heard from my colleagues, from Members on this side of the House, that there are communities who do want to establish a child and family service committee and they are not getting any uptake from the department. So I’d like to ask the Minister if he can explain why we can’t get these child and family service committees established. Thank you.
Thank you. I don’t know the exact reason. Reasons vary, I do believe, from community to community on why the committees were unable to strike these committees. They vary from not wanting to be involved in the child welfare of other people, and sometimes communities are so small that all child protection and child welfare issues seem to be of a relative child and so on. For some, actually, the fact that the authority staff are not consistently meeting with the community and putting a consistent push into trying to get these child and family services committees struck and operational is largely due to the fact that we have lots of social worker vacancies. So some of it is that, but a lot of it is just the communities not being interested in doing this. Although we think it’s an essential part of child protection, the communities see it as difficult work. Thank you.
I thank the Minister for the explanation, and I guess I would encourage Members who feel they have a community that wants a child and family service committee to get in touch with their community leadership and have them, with the Member perhaps, get in touch with the Minister, because I know there are at least one or two communities where I have heard that Members want to get a child and family service committee started.
A lot of the recommendations that are in the report require money, and that was accepted in the 16th Assembly by the committee, that there was a need to put money into budgets in order to get many of these recommendations done. However, I’d like to ask the Minister what money exists in the 2013-14 budget that is specifically addressed to Child and Family Services Act review recommendations. Thank you.
Thank you. A lot of our work, our regular health and social services work does address a lot of these recommendations. Like I indicated earlier, there will be some that we can’t do because we will be waiting for revisions.
We will continue to run about a half a million, $500,000 in trying to create child and family services committees. Also, we’re expanding the Healthy Families. Again, another key program that was requested through the recommendations of the review and we’re expanding that. We are trying to, I think this coming year we’re expanding into all communities in the Sahtu. That would be an expansion into all of the regions. In Deh Cho we’ve gone Simpson, Liard, Fort Providence, as an example, Inuvik, McPherson, and the Healthy Families there want to expand into Tuk and Aklavik. So as we expand the program and provide supports to the authority, it seems like that program is going to grow, and we’re going to try to accommodate that, and we’ve put money in the budget now to expand into the Sahtu and then we’ll continue to put money in the budget to expand that very important program. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Minister. I agree that the Healthy Families program is a good program, but I would suggest to the Minister that the lack of focused money in the ‘13-14 budget, apart from that one program, is not going to the recommendations from this report.
Thank you. Unfortunately, I do not have the latest detail on what we’re doing to close that gap with 16 to 18 year olds in the NWT within the act. I’m almost positive that it’s going to require revision to the act as per the legislative proposal, but I can’t say 100 percent that we can do more without a revision. So I will commit to the Member and to the Assembly to update the Members on that specific item within those recommendations. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
