Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today to talk about something that’s a concern, especially in our smaller communities dealing with oral health care.

A colleague of mine yesterday made a statement on Drop the Pop. That’s one way we’re looking at preventing oral disease, tooth decay and issues that arise with poor oral health. This government lost out on some funding in this coming budget through the THSSI funding that we get through the federal government and there’s still a lot of concern out there in the small communities about poor health care within our children, and even within our children...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the Minister and his staff for exchanging some information with us today. It’s been over two years, I guess, since we’ve been working with the Housing Corporation. I just want to commend the Minister and his staff on the improvements and hard work that they’ve done. It’s been very noticeable. I know we get a lot of good feedback within committee after our exchanges or meetings that we do have, so that’s been great.

First off, I just want to talk about some of the investments into our public housing stock as well as the transitional housing and Shelter...

It’s February 18th today. He mentioned that the new contract takes effect February 1st.

Can I ask the Minister, in the contract layover, how many days was the phone operation not in effect? How many days was there nobody answering the phones at this service?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I have some questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services in regard to some of the questions that I had posed yesterday. I go on to the website for the NWT Helpline and there’s a reference right on the top that says, “When you call, we will listen.” In fact, after I made questions in the House yesterday, I did get some correspondence from some of our community providers that work in counselling and they said they wanted to make a call to the NWT Helpline to see how helpful it is for some of the people that they might work with.

I’d like to ask the...

That begs to ask the question, why did I receive an e-mail from my questions based in the House the other day that when somebody tried to call there was nobody answering the phone? Not only that, when the phone continues to ring, there’s not even an answering machine to say, you know, nobody’s here to answer your phone, please call this number. There’s not that service, and I have to ask the Minister, what is he going to do to rectify that problem, putting an answering machine on the phone when it’s not being answered?

All the information is appreciated, especially when you heard around the table today the lack of nursing services that we have in some of our small communities that need to access this helpline. What we heard today just right now from the Minister was definitely news to me in terms of the contract and also that the services were down for a while when the contracts were being put over.

Can I ask the Minister how was this mentioned to people of the Northwest Territories and to the communities? When I look on the website, there’s nothing that says that the services are going to be down at all, so...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I’d like to speak to a great event that combines both sport and the strong cultures, traditions and skills of people of the North, an event that brings our youth in connection with our elders and the leaders of the Beaufort-Delta. The opening ceremonies for the 2014 Northern and Dene Games Summit happened yesterday at East 3 Secondary School in Inuvik, which was followed by a community feast.

Over the next couple of days, 245 students from all of the Beaufort-Delta communities ranging from grades 6 to 12 will participate in activities that will test their speed...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. On this last day of replies to the budget address, I wanted to offer my insight into our current budgeting process on the operations budget.

As Members know, this is the third budget we are doing collectively as the 17th Legislative Assembly. There is some work in here, a lot of good work that’s gone over the years into this budget, starting from the very first one we started and focusing on taking different approaches on how we move things with this government.

I want to start today by referring to a line that was in the introduction during last week’s budget address...

Thank you. You’ve heard in this House before there’s been a call from some of the Members that represent small communities for an RCMP officer and nurse. As I stated, we have 65 councillors in 19 communities but we have 33 communities in the Northwest Territories, and in some of these communities we only have a nurse that can provide that type of care or services or even counselling.

Being this is such a big issue, and not looking at it this way when a person really needs that help for some intervention, how is the Minister going to address not having that nurse or that counsellor in a small...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services in regard to my opening Member’s statement about suicides.

The first question is: Do the health authorities keep track of self-inflicted visits to emergency rooms that can potentially lead to suicide? Does the department or authorities keep those kinds of statistics? Thank you.