Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I’m pretty sure that the situation the Member is describing didn’t happen while I was here because I certainly don’t remember it. It must have been a long time ago that it actually happened. The piece that I said after the mic went off was: Anything we do still has to be within standards, so it has to meet certain criteria. We’re open to that. I’m happy to have discussions with the communities, with the regions. I’ll be travelling with the Member to visit his communities at some point. I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to have that discussion and hear what the...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, if the Member can maybe help me understand the question a little bit. What does she mean by, you know, default or encouraged, by us or by their own providers or by their own government?

Yes, absolutely, and for that detail, I will go to the deputy minister, but just related to the last question, as I have indicated previously, there will be a bunch of functions coming out of the department, functions that are providing sort of core servicetype services. These are going to be in the authority rather than the department. The department is going to be a ministry. We are going to phase in some of those functions from out of the department into the authority. We anticipate that phasein is going to take about two years, but as far as monitoring evaluation, I will go to the deputy.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m happy to answer the question now or we can wait till page 195 where that actually falls. It’s up to you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, as I indicated, the mains last year were $13,881,000. We are slightly down based on some of the other driving factors in this area, some actuals, but the reason you’ll see the revised main estimates up a little higher is every year at some we end up having to come forward with a supp based on the pension top up that is required by the Hay River Health and Social Services in order to keep their pension viable. We don’t know what that cost is going to be, so we don’t build it into our mains. We come back by way of supp. We’ve already brought one supp to this...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, we’re looking at coming forward with some amendments of the Vital Statistics Act that will allow us to include Aboriginal names and appropriate fonts within birth certificates and other documents within the Northwest Territories. We’ve done some early assessment, but we don’t have a full costing of that change at this point. When we have better information on the costing, we will certainly share that with committee and the Member.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is exactly why we’re moving forward with the home and continuing care action plan. It’s going to help us identify what we currently have, where the demands are, where the draw is, and what we need to do to meet the ongoing demand for home care services across the Northwest Territories, including small communities such as the ones the Member has described.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, similar to our relationship with Alberta, we have a relationship with Nunavut where a number of their residents do come to the Northwest Territories for different diagnostic and other services that are provided here in Yellowknife, particularly residents out of the Kitikmeot region do come down here for a number of diagnostic and other type of services. We have an arrangement, similar to the arrangement across Canada, so that services provided in the Northwest Territories are direct-billed back based on a formula that’s agreed upon across this country on what...

I don’t anticipate that at this time, but as we roll forward and create this new system, new principles and ideas might come forward that might result in a change in how we’re doing business. I don’t anticipate that, but it would be foolish to say that change is never going to happen.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I mean without seeing the details, we can’t say sure, but that sounds like that meets the criteria for this particular fund, and obviously we’d love to see a proposal, but I mean until we see the detail it’d be impossible to say whether it met the criteria or not. We could share the criteria with the Member, he could share it with the community and I mean we’d be happy to see a proposal.