Bob Bromley

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are in follow up to my statement earlier today on poverty traps and directed to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. Yesterday and today I think I made it clear that our social safety net has some pretty serious poverty traps in it, but I would like to give the Minister a chance to demonstrate differently. We track people on income support more than anyone else in the NWT. We know month by month what is in their bank account.

Will the Minister tell us how many people our system has helped rise out of poverty in the last year or any year?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I believe this is dealing with increased costs for health care services, non-NWT residents and NWT residents, and I believe we are collecting or recovering costs for the non-NWT residents. Is the amount that we are increasing for health care services provided to residents outside the NWT? Is this above normal and what is the full expenditures for that item, the increased costs for health care services outside the NWT? Rather than the increase, what is the full cost to give some context to that $3.775 million? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to continue looking at our income security system and how it has created a series of poverty traps. You may remember I was telling a story about Charles and his three children. Charles is not a real person, but his story will be familiar to many people.

Let’s imagine that Charles lives in Fort Good Hope, because the Nutrition North Program keeps track of food costs there, allowing us to see how much it costs Charles to feed his family.

Nutrition North, what used to be called Food Mail, reported on their website last March that in Fort Good Hope it costs...

Thanks to the Minister. This sounds like a significant increase here and I’m surprised that the process is such that the Minister is not able to be prepared to answer very simple questions here. I would ask that this House consider a process to make sure the Minister has that information when bringing forward requests for increases such as this. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. What is the total budget here that this $170,000 is being added to and what will the total be at the end of the year?

Perhaps I could ask what the purpose of the Reserve Fund is and why it’s set at the point that it’s set at and why we are exceeding that by $26 million.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the point here. The point is we don’t want to hold up the program, but we do want to make sure that a community JK, junior kindergarten, group begins that there is a fully qualified early education worker on staff there. I appreciate that amendment and this motion, this amendment to the amendment, supports Mr. Menicoche’s suggestion to delete the phrase “group before the program is implemented” and replace that so that it says there is at least one fully trained early education worker for every junior kindergarten group before that group begins in that...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Thanks to the Minister. I recognize that many of the costs he mentioned are indeed increasing. In terms of the increased travel, the intent of all our tens of millions of dollars of investments was to directly address that. I think studies have shown upwards of 50 percent of medical travel patients were out on the street an hour after they had their appointment and didn’t really need that travel. With what we’ve invested now in telehealth, electronic imaging, the direct access to physicians and so on, hopefully we’ll be saving quite a bit on that front. I’ll just leave that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Frame Lake, that the amendment to Motion 13-17(5) be amended by adding the following after the phrase “first paragraph after the resolution portion of the motion”: and replacing them with the words “before that group begins in that community”. I think we need one more minute, Mr. Chair.

It sounds like that’s the hard reality and our budgeting system does not have flexibility to do this and redefine that base even conservatively. We know typically this year the numbers I have have increased about 5.5 percent. I think in the order of 4 to 6 percent is typical across Canada, so we could adjust it by 3 or 3.5 percent theoretically, but it doesn’t sound like we have that flexibility. So, onwards.