Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as a result of the critical incident investigation, 16 recommendations were provided to me. Of those recommendations, two of them are specific to Aklavik; the remainder are more systemic or system-based. The two recommendations that do reference Aklavik specifically in my mind also are for the whole territory, not just for Aklavik, but clearly we have some work to do in the Northwest Territories to improve care for all residents. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following two documents entitled "2016 Annual Report - Public Utilities Board of the Northwest Territories," as well as "Workers' Safety and Compensation Commission 2015-2017 Strategic Plan." Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I've had an opportunity to travel around the Northwest Territories and meet leaders from across the territories, and when I meet them I do talk to them about how we can work better together to recruit and retain local people in jobs. I'm a big fan of local people for local work.

Having said that, a number of the healthcare professions, we certainly have a challenge finding individuals with the appropriate skills, which means we have to explore things in new creative ways. With respect to providing mental health services, we are working with the community of Deline to develop a pilot where we...

There is a significant amount of work being done on this, and there is a framework that is being developed that sort of outlines the parameters of what the youth mental health and addictions action plan will look like. I don't want to presuppose the outcomes, but the types of things the Member is talking about are the types of things we are attempting to incorporate within the plan, to bring services close to the people throughout the Northwest Territories and make sure that they have access. I can't say exactly what the model is going to look like at this point because we haven't finalized...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the Member's statement today. I thought it was quite good and I think it hit a number of the points. I think one of the key points there is that, ultimately, our staff do have the ability to leave positions as they might to pursue other jobs.

As far as transition, the more time we have the more transition we can provide to ensure that services aren't impacted. The particular case the Member is referring to, I don't have the details so I don't know exactly what happened in the community with respect to that position.

Mr. Speaker, the Government of the Northwest Territories has made a commitment in its mandate to continue implementing the Early Childhood Development Action Plan to improve early childhood development, and by enhancing access to early intervention services for children zero to five years of age, and supporting community wellness initiatives with early childhood development funding and subject matter expertise.

Today, I want to share with you some of the progress our government has made in supporting children and their families through the first three years of the Right from the Start Framework...

The priority of the most recent roundtable was to actually develop the evaluation criteria that we will use going forward, and the conversation around a definition came up again. That is our goal in that group, is to share information on different projects that are happening, to share good ideas so that people can take those good ideas back to the regions.

The main activity coming out of that is let's get this evaluation criteria in place; let's start evaluating the great success that is out there today from the NGOs, from the Aboriginal governments, from the community governments, as well as...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we have already talked about this a couple of times during this particular sitting. One of the challenges we have is that we do not have a truly defined definition of what "poverty" is in the Northwest Territories, which does make it hard to evaluate any of the work that we are doing against it. We have made a commitment to work with our stakeholders to find a definition.

At the same time, during our last Anti-poverty Roundtable, the department did present a number of criteria that we are going to consider monitoring and evaluating to help us determine...

Absolutely. I will give an example. In Sahtu we had a situation where there was a tragedy in one of their communities and what was requested of us was to support a bunch of the youth to go out on the land in order to experience healing and get out of the community, which we supported fully because it was the right thing to do. It is what the community wanted. It is what the youth needed. Listening to the community is critical. We do those types of things.

Sometimes, we hear, we want something done on the land immediately. Sometimes we say, give us a couple of weeks to stabilize here. Then we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there is no formal written policy; however, it is a common long-standing practice within the health and social services system that responding to a tragedy is a priority for the Government of the Northwest Territories. Recognizing that every situation is different, that every community has a different response, what we tend to do is work with the community leadership to find out what it is they expect or what they are hoping to get from the Department of Health and Social Services when a crisis arises, and providing that service as best we can and working...