David Ramsay

Mr. Speaker, the problems at that hospital have been around for a number of years, going back eight years now. I don’t know how waving a magic wand and getting a public administrator in there for three months is going to address the problems.

There are some serious issues with management and the operation of that hospital that need to be addressed, and they haven’t been addressed to date. I’d like to ask the Minister: what are the plans to address the management at that hospital? That, to me, is where the problems lie.

Thank you. Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. It gets back, again, to what I talked about yesterday and what I had mentioned earlier in my Member’s statement. That’s the fact that FMBS has been paying the payroll at Stanton Territorial Hospital for the past six months, and they’re into FMBS now to the tune of over $20 million.

I’d like to ask the Minister — and the alarm bells should be going off for somebody somewhere if this is the case, and it looks like it is: does the Minister know what the hospital is doing with the $4 million to $4.5...

Mr. Chairman, I’d like to thank the Minister for that and would encourage him to keep the dialogue going with the UNW and the other unions to ensure that grievances are dealt with in a timely fashion.

I’d like to ask the Minister: are there guidelines in place for dealing with grievances? Is there a policy where you would deem two years an excessive length of time for folks to wait to get a grievance dealt with? Should we set up at least some guidelines or some standards that we judge ourselves by? Are there any in place already?

Mr. Chairman, just because an employee accesses stress leave or other leave doesn’t necessarily make them a bad employee, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that. I think in many cases it’s bad management, and it’s the employee feeling victimized in the workplace or harassed or intimidated or whatever you want. There are many reasons employees seek stress leave and extended medical leave.

I also wanted to ask the Minister…. If that type of analysis hasn’t been done, I think that’d be something worth providing to Members of this House — which departments have more employees who have accessed...

Mr. Chairman, that’s information I could get a later time. If the Minister doesn’t have that at his disposal, that’s fine.

One other thing before I go — I’ve got a minute left. I just wanted to touch on the Hackett Report. One thing that was contained in the Hackett Report was…. When they looked at the business processes at the Department of Human Resources, one of the things that stuck out for me was, in an organization comparable in size to the GNWT they would need four times fewer employees to deliver services to the workforce. That always stuck in my mind. If a comparable-sized organization...

Mr. Chairman, I thank the Minister for that. I think it is only a matter of time before the aboriginal governments that are out there, and the ones that are going to settle land claims, begin drawing down their authorities and powers under the land claim agreements.

Any work the Government of the Northwest Territories can do at the onset, and that’s today…. If there’s some work already been done…. I think the more work we do in this regard, the better off we’ll be tomorrow in an effort to save us resources.

And that’s just the thing, Mr. Chairman: resources are scarce. In a territory the size of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To my knowledge, there was a public administrator there over the past number of years. I’d like to ask the question: what were the former public administrators doing, and what was the CEO doing? Why do we have to get another public administrator in there again to tell us what’s going on when we know what the problems are? It’s in management, and we have to take care of that. Can I ask the Minister that?

Mr. Speaker, we’re talking a little bit about semantics, whether FMBS pays first or Stanton pays. The bottom line is they’re not paying their bills. I’d like to ask the Minister again: if they’re not paying the $4.5 million to FMBS to address the salaries question, what are they spending that $4.5 million on?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to speak again today about Stanton Territorial Hospital. Yesterday I spoke about the fact that the hospital has built up an accrued deficit of $11.5 million over the past few years. I questioned the Minister yesterday in regard to what plan the government had to address the deficit, and she mentioned the fact that it will be coming before the House under Supplementary Appropriation No. 4 during the life of this session. I look forward to her disclosing what the government’s plan is at the appropriate time.

I want to talk today about what I see as a lack of...

Mr. Chairman, I thank the Minister for that. I think it’d be a useful tool. Some of my colleagues have called some…. Not all workplace environments in the government are toxic, but some of them out there are toxic. People are having to access sick leave and disability leave and whatnot in greater numbers than I can ever remember. I think it’s a systemic problem. If it’s management or if it’s…. The finger has to be pointed somewhere, and ultimately someone has to be accountable for the increased occurrences in stress leave, disability leave and extended medical leave. So I’ll look forward to...