Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to make a couple comments here. The first one is with the day shelters here in Yellowknife and Inuvik. I just want to talk about the importance of having these in place, especially during the winter months, and that funding. I know funding in Inuvik was supposed to go to the Day Shelter. That money was resituated so that it could into an emergency shelter in the evenings. I know, speaking with some of the board members, they talked about the importance of doing a day shelter now, so we’re looking at both emergency shelters and day shelters.

With the day...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just want to ask the Minister, how do we promote one of our other big attractions, the Mackenzie River? We can look at possibly providing some kind of package for the Mackenzie River. I’d like to ask the Minister, are we promoting our Mackenzie River expedition?

In regards to the Sunrise Festival, I know the department really does a great job in promoting our northern lights, and we do see that. It’s pretty evident here in Yellowknife when we see all the tourists here. But like I mentioned in my Member’s statement, there’s no other place that I know of in the world that has a celebration of welcoming back the sun. This is huge and I think that it’s something that we can market as well. Also, the Minister had mentioned in his Minister’s statement before about the Oil and Gas Strategy. We know the economy is slow and that oil and gas activity is not...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d also like to welcome Mr. Richard Letourneau. He’s a constituent of Inuvik Boot Lake and I just want to thank him for all the work he does in Inuvik at the school. He’s also with the French society. I hope you enjoy the proceedings today. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Chair I have questions along similar lines with the deficits and the accumulated deficits. Just listening to the Minister respond to Ms. Bisaro’s questions, I guess as we’re moving towards one authority, how is the department going to work in terms of the accumulated deficits? When you look at the public accounts records, we have Stanton accumulated at over $15 million and the Beaufort-Delta, which did a good job last year, they had a surplus, finally, after a long time, but this year they have another deficit of about $2.5 million and now it’s accumulated back up to almost $8...

More of a comment in terms of when we get into the smaller communities that’s where we start to tend to see some of the higher health risks, higher rates of some of our health indicators as well as educational indicators, and I think that if we had somebody staffed in there that can deal with some of the care and treatment but also on the prevention and promotion and education awareness side, I think we could really tackle some of those high rates that we see in the small communities and bring them down so that we start having more healthy and educated people in the small communities and not...

I’m glad that the department is keeping up to date on all these national standards. In fact, this is the first ever national level set of indicators that identifies and reports on the mental health of Canadians.

So I’d like to ask the Minister, if this report is something that the department wants to move forward on, will he bring together stakeholders to look at these indicators and act on them, much like the Anti-Poverty Strategy? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Can I get confirmation on how much that contract was? How much did we contract with Dalhousie for?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement I made references to two different reports that came out. One was the Mental Health Indicators for Canada. I’d like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services if he or his department is familiar with this report that was released on January 22nd and if it’s been something that’s been brought up a lot among the Health and Social Services Ministers across the country. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the update on the agreement and the funding from Health Canada. Speaking with mental health and addictions theme day again, I think that’s one area that we might be lacking in. I think we need to provide more services and programs. You heard it today in some questions about the waiting times to get into counselling. I’m glad that we’re streamlining people to get down to treatment and getting to the institutions that they need to go to, to get the help that they need, but it’s when they come back to the communities, especially if it’s a small remote community...