Glen Abernethy

The opening of the new health centre and long-term care facility in Norman Wells will be a significant accomplishment for the region, for the delivery of services in Norman Wells and that region. We will definitely have an opening ceremony event. The Regional Wellness Council will absolutely, without question, be involved, as well as regional leadership and the MLA, of course. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

With the move to a single authority in the Regional Wellness Councils, we are hoping that the Regional Wellness Councils do have an opportunity to travel throughout the regions that they represent. As the Member said, the Regional Wellness Council in the Sahtu did have a meeting in Tulita. They have a meeting scheduled in Colville Lake and they will over time get to all the communities that they represent.

As far as getting information, program information, out to the communities, one of the reasons that the Regional Wellness Councils are so important is they can help us tailor our message to...

The Strategic Framework for Mental Health and Addictions Recovery recognizes the importance of culture. This is foundational to the work that we do and will be reflected in the action plans, including the one for child and youth mental wellness. The implications of colonization and the resultant loss of culture are a clear and strong focus of the work we will be doing to ensure culturally relevant and capable services and supports for residents of the Northwest Territories. The Child and Youth Mental Wellness Action Plan emphasizes the importance of providing access to landbased programs...

This is a very exciting initiative. Child and youth care counsellors will be an important part of the overall continuum of mental wellness services for children, youth, as well as families. They will work in the schools and the broader community and will work in an integrated fashion with other communitybased professionals to ensure person and familycentred services are delivered as close to home as possible.

This is an incredibly important resource that is required in all regions, and it needs to be implemented thoughtfully and with input from all involved stakeholders. We are working with the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to recognize the members of the Antipoverty Advisory Committee as visitors in the gallery today. The committee plays an important role in helping to guide the planning for annual antipoverty roundtables. They have helped us to establish performance measures for poverty in the Northwest Territories, and they do a hard work in reviewing the applications to the Antipoverty Fund. I really respect their guidance and their commitment to the Northwest Territories and residents and communities. I am happy to have them here with us today. We have with us here...

I appreciate that the Member thinks that this is easy and it can be done with the stroke of a pen, but if we are going to make a change on some financial levels, we need to understand the implications of those. We need to understand why. I will say that in cases of undue hardship, where a family is experiencing some significant difficulty, we are willing to look at these on a oneoff, oneonone basis to make sure that we are not really disadvantaging families where there is undue hardship.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I do not know what the rationale for the $80,000 co-payment is or, rather, the level of the $80,000 co-payment. I know that my predecessor once referred to it as an arbitrary number. Clearly, we need to review the use of co-payment and the amount of the co-payment. That work is currently being done as part of the medical travel review, where we are reviewing a number of aspects of the medical travel policy, including the co-payment. We want to take into consideration not just the family income, but the size of the family; the illness that the individual...

I do not sit on one of the Regional Wellness Councils. The Regional Wellness Councils are the ones who, to some degree, determine when they are going to schedule their meetings. They are required to have one meeting, I think it is annually in public. All their meetings are supposed to be in public to some degree. They can go in camera. I am not prepared to, and I am not going to, dictate when and where they have their meetings. I think we need to leave that up to them. They know their regions best, and they know when they need to get together to have those conversations.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I know that we do have some resources out there when it comes to H. pylori and providing information. As far as workshops, I'm not sure that we've actually provided workshops in the past or that we actually have the information to provide workshops, but I will talk to the department to find out how best we can get that information out to residents of the Sahtu but also to the Northwest Territories where appropriate. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Through our discussion with stakeholders across the Northwest Territories, one of the things we constantly hear are that options are important and that one size does not fit all when it comes to programming. The use of technology to assist in delivering services to more remote communities is one that the department is exploring. In the meantime, we do have a number of mechanisms where individuals can receive services, including our 24/7 NWT Help Line. We have the opportunity through things like Facebook to do group sessions, group counselling sessions. There is the Kids Help Phone. As...