EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
Deputy Speaker (interpretation): Thank you Mr. Minister Ng. Oral questions, member for Baker Lake, Mr. McLean.
Question 502 – 1(3): Deferral of Capital Projects
My question today is to the Minister of Public Works.
The session seems to be drawn out and there seems to be a lot of controversy about what projects are going ahead and what ones are being delayed.
How many projects are going to be delayed this year.
There is nothing as of today that will be delayed.
Deputy Speaker (interpretation): Thank you Madame Minister.
Responses to Written Questions.
Tabled Document 89 – 1(3): Airfare Rates
I made a statement earlier on under members' statements and I said that I would be tabling a document.
This document comes from the high arctic and their discussion about the high cost of airfares in the communities.
Tabled Document 90 – 1(3): Response to Petition 9 - 1(3)
Tabled Document 91 – 1(3): Election Returns and Declarations
I wish to table a couple of documents.
First document is a response to petition 9 - 1(3) tabled by the member for Baker Lake which has been filed with the clerk's office.
Also, pursuant to section 1.83 (4) of The Nunavut First Elections Act, I am tabling the election returns and declarations respecting election contribution expenses for two candidates.
Deputy Speaker (interpretation): Thank you, Mr. Clerk.
I would like to give notice that on April 25 I will move the following motion.
I move that rule 68 (1) be waived and that the period for the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Services to report back to the House on Bill 11, An Act To Establish Nunavut Day as a Holiday, be extended to the Fourth Session of the Legislative Assembly.
Deputy Speaker: Thank you Mr. Akesuk.
Notice of Motions for First Reading of Bills.
Bill 13, Tabled Document 41 - 1(3); Tabled Document 61-1(3) Tabled Document 85-1(3); Tabled Document 87-1(3).
According to the power vested in me by motion 3 – 1(3), the committee will sit until it reports itself out, with Mr. Iqaqrialu as the Chairperson.
We will take a 30 minute lunch break before we begin.
>>House recessed at 11:51 a.m. and resumed at 12:37 p.m.
Chairperson (interpretation): We now have a quorum, members.
We will resume.
We have Bill 13, tabled documents 41 – 1(3), 61 – 1(3), 85 – 1(3).
General comment.
I have been asking the minister and I will be asking for a response.
Some of the JPs cannot even read English.
I have been asking the Minister of Justice if they have to use the Justice of the Peace at the community level.
Chairperson (interpretation): I forgot to mention that we are dealing with the Department of Justice.
Minister Anawak and your officials if you would like to go to the witness table.
You may do so now so that Mr. Barnabas may ask his questions.
Could you introduce your officials please.
To me left is Nora Sanders.
She is the Deputy Minister for the Department of Justice and Rebecca Williams, Assistant Deputy Minister.
Another official sitting over there also works for the Department of Justice.
General comments and questions.
As I have stated before, I have asked the minister numerous times in regards to the Justices of the Peace.
Some of them cannot even read English and there are unilingual speaking people and they have to be assisted by the RCMP when they charge somebody.
The JP has to abide by the regulations that are set forth and I know that they are only in English currently.
They still have not been translated.
I have asked the minister if they will be translated.
I am just wondering what the status of this is now.
Yes I thought we were just going to go straight to general comments.
At this point the Justices of the Peace are now being trained and I know that we are now trying to get the Summaries of Statutes translated and the regulations.
However, if they have not already been translated they will be translated and Neil Sharkey who is responsible for that it is evident that he will proceed to work on these.
I know that the actual Summaries of Statutes are not translated into Inuktitut, the ones that we inherited from the GNWT, if they are not already translated they will be translated.
Mr. Barnabas (interpretation): Thank you.
I am just reiterating the question that was asked before.
The Justices of the Peace, when they do their work they are paid an honorarium of 40 dollars.
Are you going to increase that rate because they have to deal with social issues and the Justices of the Peace do have an impact on the people who have been charged and going to court.
I know that as we work on the issue of Justices of the Peace it is evident that we will start training them.
As we proceed with the training, we have not considered their honorarium rate but it is evident that as we progress with the training program that we will start working with the Justices of the Peace.
At this point I am sure that I could say that as we proceed with the training program we will ask Neil Sharkey to review the rate that is paid to the JPs.
Any other general comments.
I have spoken to the minister himself personally and I would like to ask him a question.
In the communities we would like to see a correctional centre within Nunavut where the people get help.
When people are sent outside of the community for example to Edmonton, when they have to be incarcerated and when they have been away from home for a long time they start losing their self-esteem.
For example when they come back to the communities, I know in Kugluktuk and you also know, when a person is incarcerated it is very difficult for the people and I feel that there should be more correctional centres closer to home within Nunavut.
I believe that we could have a better future when we are actually with our own people.
We have to make sure that these people are using their culture, they are away from their culture when they have to go elsewhere to be incarcerated.
I feel that when they have to go down south they leave their culture and language behind and there should be healing for these people because they need it.
I am seeking support from the minister himself and I am making sure that this is known publicly because it is very important to the people of my riding.
For example, it is not only Kugluktuk, it is all over Nunavut that it is getting very difficult for many people. It changes their lifestyle, this is our own culture and heritage, and it gets very difficult for people who have to be incarcerated outside of Nunavut.
I feel that it is very important that we should start having more places where people could be healed.
We all know, it is right in front of us, that we are losing good people, people that have knowledge.
I feel that there should be a place where people could be taught that there is a brighter future than they have now.
I feel that this is very important to the people of Nunavut.
This is a concern within my riding and I feel that we could have a better future if we start having places like that within our own communities.
If you can understand his question.
It is mostly a comment.
Mr. Anawak if you could reply.
Yes we understand his concern.
The people that go down south to serve their sentences and back in Nunavut they usually go to Yellowknife to be incarcerated.
We have noticed that there are a lot of them that have committed crimes and they have to be sent down south to be incarcerated and their way of living changes drastically when they come back home.
One of the problems is because their relatives cannot go and visit them because it is too expensive to go down south.
Just as an example, the people that have spent time in a penitentiary, they can get visits from their relatives.
However, Inuit that go down to a Federal Penitentiary are not visited very often by their relatives and they cannot stay for any length of time when they go to visit.
For this reason we are trying to look at ways to get some funding from the Federal Government to see whether we can build a maximum-security facility in Nunavut.
I know there is already a correctional centre here in Iqaluit but it is not very big.
We feel that if there is no other correctional facility over here it would be better and staff at the Department of Justice have worked with this and I will be meeting with the Solicitor General of Canada in the near future.
I already had a meeting with him this winter and perhaps we can talk to him about this during the meeting that I will have with him in the near future.
Yes, to the member's question or comment, Kugluktuk has wanted a correctional facility in their hometown or in the Kitikmeot region.
At this time we are looking for some funding from the Federal Government.
The Solicitor General is not with Justice so I am not sure how to put it into Inuktitut.
I will be meeting with him in the near future to talk about the concern of the member. Because we have our own territory now I will be asking him if we can get funding to build a facility.
The kind of facility we want and the location also has to be reviewed.
I feel for the member's comment and his riding has written us a letter to build a facility in Kugluktuk, but at this time we cannot say what we might be doing. I will meet again with Lawrence Macauley the Solicitor General for Canada and when I get some information as to the money that we might receive, we hope to get some money but we don't know how much it would be and when it would be so I just wanted to make that comment.
Sometime in the near future maybe could we get just a little more accurate timeline.
Maybe a month, three months, a year down the road.
Just do you have any idea when you say the near future.
Just for my information.
The staff is working at getting together a meeting between the Solicitor General's staff and our staff here at Justice in about 10 days.
Within 10 days.
Shortly after that they will be working at getting a meeting between the Solicitor General and myself.
So I would hope that we would have a meeting within the next three weeks with the minister and from there be able to report I hope some kind of progress on looking for some funding for a correctional facility in Nunavut.
I do not have any names on my list at this time.
I was just falling asleep.
Just to elaborate on Mr. Havioyak's comment or question.
It seems like these people are sort of left behind and the women are treated a lot better.
Some communities have had that concern for the men to be given more fair treatment just like the women inmates in regards to healing.
I would like to ask the minister if they could have more healing sessions for men.
Currently the work that is carried out by the Department of Justice is geared toward corrections and the majority of the inmates are usually male.
We are trying to work on that but on top of that you have to realize that many of the inmates, most of them are male.
We want to produce some programs that can be better suited to the male population to see if they can have social and life skills training programs and such.
These are some of the programs that we are working toward.
I was talking about that yesterday because I said that there would be four positions opening that are going to be dealing with those programs.
Even for people who have just gone through the court system, whether they actually spent time as an inmate or not.
These four people would be working mostly with the Inuit on the healing matters.
The treatment programs are usually in another division completely because if a person is interested in treatment and healing, what we want to do is have it initiated by the community while we are support people.
We would be more than happy to encourage the communities to ask for our support but they are the ones that have to initiate the healing and treatment programs and trying to help their inmates adjust.
My question was not a full question that was just a part.
This concerns inmates when they return to their communities after they have been in corrections.
It seems that all they get is welcome back, I think there should be some aftercare because welcoming a person back and not doing anything to help them does not really contribute to correcting one's mistakes or lifestyles.
When a person has been through the court and jail system he seems to be just dropped off as soon as he gets out of jail and I think there should be some proper treatment or healing programs.
They should have some counselling provided to them by way of interviewing and things like that because they seem to have no other place to go once they have been through the justice system.
I think there should be some follow up because the women inmates seem to get all the help that they need.
However, if you look at this in the future, although I was interested in starting up a program I would probably have to raise some funds for healing programs for our male inmates.
I would like to see our community start something like that too.
As I stated yesterday there will be four new positions.
One in Iqaluit, one in the north Baffin, Keewatin and Kitikmeot.
I will start with that for now.
We have these four positions so that they could help the people that are going to go through court and they could also help to work with people that have committed crimes.
Also when they come back from their incarceration these four positions will do the follow up.
It is true that the majority of people who have been incarcerated down south finally come back home to something even worse.
Sometimes their family members are no longer around, they lose their house and their equipment and their property, and I know that there is no form of assistance given to ex-inmates.
The social workers are responsible to take care of these inmates that are coming home and they have on top of that the responsibility for example, if a guy beats up his wife the social worker has to work with the offender and the victim at the same time.
That is where the problem occurs.
That's why this winter we will establish four new positions, if we are able to get more funding in the next fiscal year we would like to see more positions open. All of the comments of the members from Tunnuniq and Kugluktuk are very important to us so that is why we are bringing these four positions out.
Mr. Nutarak (interpretation): The four positions since you have already announced where these four positions will be going.
Will we have to approve the budget first before the positions are advertised.
Hon. Jack Anawak (interpretation): We expect that once the budget is approved that we will have advertisements for the four positions. This is urgent so we will begin as soon as we have the money.
I guess my ten minutes is up.
I would like to thank the minister and his officials for appearing before the committee of the whole.
Although I do not have many questions but I would like to say that I am a true blue Inuk.
As the minister had stated a majority of the people that tend to commit crimes tend to be male, yes I agree with that and it is a fact.
But today some of the men are just scared and fearful of women even when they are couples, some men.
It is not the case with all the men, but some of them are fearful of their wives because they know that the wife will get all the support and services. They have all the support and services for the women.
In the past that is not how it was, the men were not denigrated by the women, but today it seems to be that way.
I would think that the majority of the people that commit crimes are usually men and I feel that the men are instigated to commit crimes.
I hope that sometime in the future when a couple has charged her spouse, I would suggest that we look to the root cause of the problem.
If the female charges her husband or her boyfriend and right away after he is charged he has to go through the court right away, rather than trying to find out what the real cause of the problem is and that guy has to go through the court system.
I would like to ask if your department has considered if they have ever thought of doing what I just said.
Some of the people have to go through the court system, some of them are charged for summary convictions if they committed a crime.
According to the Inuit way perhaps they could have had an opportunity to resolve their issues before going to the court, and sometimes individuals have to wait a long time to go to court, both the offender and the victim.
When they have finally made up, they end up having to go through the courts.
In court they start fighting amongst each other again.
We are trying a pilot project in Rankin Inlet to resolve their problems before the case being seen in court.
Sometimes the couple had forgiven each other and after they had forgiven each other they still have to pass through the court.
This way there would be less conflict.
We are sensitive to that and we are now trying to work on it.
Mr. Nutarak (interpretation): Sometimes the older people are in the court or there are some elders who go into court to resolve something and they are unable to make a decision that the offender has to follow, whether it is a conditional order or something like that.
We are trying to assist the communities to be able to take on the roles that they would like to take, according to the Inuit culture.
We are very grateful to Judge Brown who works in the communities with the elders that could help and assists them in doing justice in the communities.
However, we all know that this is just the beginning and we will continue to work on this, on trying to improve by using the Inuit culture in the court system.
We are very grateful for people who have started this in the communities and we are thankful to our staff for being able to implement and use Inuit culture because they recognize the Inuit culture has a lot more to offer when it comes to people who commit crimes.
We will continue to work on that.
Mr. Anawak already mentioned about the Justices of the Peace and the numbers of Justices of the Peace in the communities are growing and they will be taking on some training as well.
I was wondering if the plan that you had in place for the JPs has been implemented now.
Starting on April 1 there is only one physical courthouse in Nunavut.
Only one location.
What we are trying to do in the communities is have the JP and the Nunavut court work together, and the Justice Committees work together as well in the communities with the JP right in the community as long as they are willing to take on those responsibilities.
Right now we have only one court here in Nunavut but when the Nunavut Government began we started doing a review of the Legislation and we are trying to revise that.
As an example, last week there was somebody in court and they were told that there was nothing in place in Nunavut because we were following the GNWT way.
At this time we are trying to get the Justice Committees in each community and the JPs to work together.
Mr. Nutarak do you have any other comments.
Mr. Havioyak: Mr. Chairman do we have a quorum.
Anyway, I wanted to ask the minister and his staff.
You touched on on-the-land camps and alternative homes.
A few years back I was involved in setting up one of those camps in our region.
How well do those kinds of camps work.
I am just curious because you were talking about that in your opening comments.
I am just curious because I know the one in our area didn't work very well because of the distance.
I don't know I just want to know how those camps operate, did it fail, why, those things.
We would like to do as much as we can for the outpost camp program.
I guess part of the problem in the past was that there was probably not adequate preparations to start an outpost camp program.
So in the outpost camp program, of course some worked better than others.
We are in the process of setting one up in Arviat as I speak right now where the camp is about 100 miles up the Goose River.
What we want to do is promote the outpost camp program but in the process make sure that the people who operate those outpost camp programs have the training required, have the necessary knowledge of whatever their responsibilities.
Again, I think that if we can get more outpost camp programs or if there are more proposals for outpost camp programs we would look at it because we want to promote that.
We just had a gathering of outpost camp operators and alternative homes to give them more training.
So I would just respond by saying that in the past, maybe part of the problem was inadequate training, inadequate funding or inadequate knowledge of what the responsibilities were.
However, we will provide all that if we are going to initiate an outpost camp program.
I would like to ask the members, I know that I do have general comments to make so I would like to ask if Mr. Nutarak could be the Chairperson for the committee of the whole while I ask my questions.
Chairperson (Mr. Nutarak) (interpretation): Mr. Iqaqrialu.
I will be making my general comments because I think it has been four or five years that I have been a Justice of the Peace and I would like to talk about some of the suggestions or some thoughts that I have had on it.
Since I have been working as a Justice of the Peace, I have seen some of the problems of a Justice of the Peace myself.
I know that we are starting to resolve some of the problems that occurred for Justices of the Peace.
To me the problem is that the regulations or the policies do not reflect the Inuit way of life.
That is where the problem kept occurring.
As a Justice of the Peace, you cannot bypass these regulations or policies.
According to my experience, these regulations governing the Justice of the Peace should reflect the Inuit way of life.
When you are a Justice of the Peace and you have to deal with a person who has committed a summary crime it becomes very hard especially when you have to follow the rules that you cannot bypass.
As Inuit people since I was a child I am sure some of us can remember, that if we did something wrong we would be talked to and disciplined that way so that the problem that occurred would not reoccur.
So we used to be disciplined orally if we did something wrong.
That way the discipline used to work a lot.
As a Justice of the Peace you cannot do that.
So that is where I have seen the problem.
Secondly, I understood the fact that when you live in a community everyone knows each other, especially when you are a Justice of the Peace.
When you are from the same community you tend to be related to each and every one in the community and I find it pretty hard having to try someone who is your relative.
As a Justice of the Peace, I used to think that the JP locally should go to another person in a different community rather than trying a relative in the home community.
I know that it would cost money but that is one of the solutions that I have thought of, going to a different community to try an individual who has been charged.
I know that this has created a personal problem for me when you have to try your own relative in the court.
This breaks the family unity when that happens.
So I have seen that problem as a Justice of the Peace.
I apologize for coughing and I forgot my glass of water up there.
I also would like to stress that the elders take part in the court system and when they help the judge out when the judge is trying an individual, these elders who are sitting up there with the Judge they don't even receive an honoraria.
They are not paid a penny and they have to get away although they have work at home and they are not even paid a penny.
I have seen that myself personally, these elders really do not know the means how to make money so this has to be considered and this needs to be resolved and if the Justices of the Peace could be allowed to verbally reprimand the individual.
I know that I have encountered this problem and this needs to be resolved.
I just wanted to point this out under my general comment.
Please say thank you Mr. Chairman after you do your comments.
Anyone else.
If there are no more comments would Mr. Iqaqrialu come back to the Chair.
Chairperson (Mr. Iqaqrialu) (interpretation): Any more general comments or questions on the Department of Justice.
I think we are going to have a problem as we don't have enough time to do the Department of Justice and some members have to go to graduation and some of them need to leave town and I would like to report progress.