Without a doubt, I've been involved right from the beginning. I've been president for 22 years. Just as a background so people know who I am, I come from the Department of Justice. I worked for Department of Justice for 10 years before I became president. I was a probation officer and then I was a director in the courts division in one of the departments. I've been intervolved in the justice and child welfare system for a long time.
I took over as president in 1996. When we finally had devolution in 2003, we were transferred the mandate of the child welfare system, but larger policies did not change. As I said earlier in my comments, the system was designed to apprehend children. It wasn't designed to keep the children with their family or with the community. It was designed to take them out. Your funding formula was based on that system: to help the family, you had to take the child. People must realize this. You're taking the child, and the family has no way—if you heard Katherine speak on certain issues—of having money to defend themselves, no way of having the right to even speak or understand this complicated system. Now it was with the court lawyers and all these things were involved.
Yes, Danny, the issue has been completely the opposite. We've kept a record of all the people we prevented from being apprehended. It had no value to the province, which we thought was absolutely ridiculous, because that shows prevention. I'm talking in the thousands. When you look at it from that side, it was designed for apprehension.
Now there's a major shift. I know in Manitoba, customary care legislation, etc., has come in to work towards prevention. But the problem now lies because we're completely underfunded—data, stats and all the evidence show that—yet they're telling us we can start working on prevention with the surplus funds. How can you have surplus funds when you're already underfunded? There's no way we're going to change to the prevention side of things.
This is our hope in Bill C-92. The focus on Bill C-92 is to go to prevention, to work with the family, to keep the family at home. To ensure that the grandparents, the aunts and uncles are all involved. Let us take care of our own children. I don't know how many times we told you and outside society. Let us take care of our own.