David Ramsay

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Your Standing Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure is pleased to provide its report on transition matters and commends it to the House.

As the 16th Legislative Assembly draws to a close, the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure continues to monitor several ongoing issues and initiatives with long-term implications. The intent of this report is to make the public and Members of the 17th Assembly aware of work in progress and highlight areas we believe will require the continued attention of our successor committee in the 17th...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As this is the last day we will all be together in this House, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank some people.

First of all, thank you to the constituents of Kam Lake who four years ago returned me to the role of representing them, their families, and businesses here in the Legislature as the MLA for Kam Lake. It continues to be an honour and a privilege to serve you.

To my colleagues -- and I will start with those I know have decided to pursue other ventures -- Mr. Speaker, it has been a pleasure working with you over the past eight years. I have enjoyed our time...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Over the life of the 16th Assembly ENR invested heavily in the development of the Northwest Territories Water Strategy. The federal government is not upholding commitments to water stewardship, and suspended water quality monitoring at stations across Canada in August 2011. Transboundary negotiations, water quality monitoring, and cumulative impact monitoring programs remain serious concerns for the committee.

Two members of the current committee monitored climate change initiatives as Members of the 16th Assembly’s Joint Committee on Climate Change. A significant...

In closing I must thank my constituency assistant, Ms. Lynda Comerford. Lynda has been with me since the day I was elected in 2003. I believe she’s the second-longest serving CA in the building. She puts in a great deal of work for me, my office, and the constituents in Kam Lake. I want to thank her very much for her eight years of service to my office.

Once again to everybody, it has been a pleasure and an honour.

I thank the Minister for that reply. I’d like to follow up by asking the Minister, who takes ultimate responsibility in evaluating the programs and services that we provide in these various areas, if we can enact some changes so that the money that we’re spending is actually going to make a difference.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services and getting back to my Member’s statement where I talked about the Northwest Territories Health Status Report that was tabled in this House on August 22nd. Some very concerning details included in that report. I spoke of those in my Member’s statement: the overall health of the territory dropping 11 percent in four years; the rate of diabetes continuing to climb; obesity 10 percent above the national average; activity rates falling from 54 percent in 2003 to 41 percent in 2009; the...

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Once again I thank the Minister for the response. In closing, last question, I guess with technology and systems being what they are today, and I’m very appreciative of the report that was tabled on the 22nd of August, but we’re dealing with two- and three-year-old data in most cases. I’m just wondering if that’s the best we can hope for going forward. We should be trying to get some more up-to-date information when dealing with these things.

In the eight years I’ve been a Member of this House I’ve seen campaigns come and go. We’ve had Get Active campaigns. We had the former Minister of Health and Social Services just a few years back handing out posters and condoms and changing from a sexual transmitted disease to an STI, sexually transmitted infection, and drawing attention to that. The numbers aren’t getting any better.

I’d again like to ask the Minister if we are going to use the data that’s contained in this report to re-evaluate the campaigns and the programs that we’re spending money on every year that really, when you look...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Minister of Health and Social Services for tabling, earlier this week, the Northwest Territories Health Status Report. There is obviously some very valuable information contained in that report. I’ve spoken many times about the government’s need to measure and evaluate the success and/or failure of our ability as a government to exert change in key social and health indicators. This report, Mr. Speaker, should be used as a baseline for the incoming government which will be elected this fall.

I’d like to point out a few statistics contained in the...

Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Just to reiterate some of my earlier comments on Bill 10, and I appreciate my colleague Mr. Abernethy’s take on the dividend and what it means to people, but from the way I look at it, I was looking for an opportunity for the government to set aside money that would eventually end up in the pockets of our residents so that they could help offset the high cost of living, it would help attract potential employees, and it would give the residents across the territory a sense of us all being in this together. Instead of the government hiving off 5 percent as it sees fit after...