Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. . These dollars cover things like basic administration, client support services, some of the direct costs by way of individual authorities, some facility maintenance and support across the different authorities, their finance costs, human resource costs and some of their system support costs. These are things that are happening in the authorities today. I don’t anticipate that these dollars are going to go down with a single authority because, as I’ve said several times, this isn’t centralization or taking anything away from the communities or regions that exist today...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To the Member’s point, I mean, I agree. We provide these dollars. We don’t dictate what program they design. In some cases, regions have actually pooled it with other money to do bigger initiatives. We offer every region $125,000 of the $1 million. Some have better uptake than others. I can give you some breakdown of the 201516 Actuals.

The Akaitcho Territory Government utilized the entire $125,000. The Deh Cho Friendship Centre took $40,000. The Gwich’in Tribal Council got $144,000. The Inuvialuit Regional Corporation got $325,000. The Inuvik Community Corp got $39,000...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, we’re just finalizing our Federal Engagement Strategy now to highlight and bring forward issues across the departments, across the government at a federal level, and this is certainly part of that. As I said, I mean I’ve brought it up with the federal Minister as well as my provincial colleagues, and we’ll certainly be bringing it up again at the next meeting. As far as moving forward with DAAIR and Finance, they are aware. Once we finalize our Federal Engagement Strategy, we will move forward accordingly.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, as they look for the exact numbers, the funding that we needed in order to do the work and the analysis and the system design and all the work required to move from a fragmented multisystem, multicompeting system to a single authority was actually federal funding that we got under the Territorial Health Innovation Fund. The fund, the total fund is $4.3 million, of which we use some of it for implementing and designing regional health strategies, some of it for medical travel, and $2.8 million annually for the duration of implementation and design for the system...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The discrepancy is because I jumped back a page. The outofterritorial hospitals, the forced growth doesn’t appear on page 181, but it is included on page 180. This whole area in total did get an increase of about $2 million in those areas, the ones I outlined previously.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, these are for a number of reasons, and I think the Member has actually identified a couple of them already. A number of the positions that you see in Hay River are as a result of the new Health and Social Services regional centre that just opened there in order to provide services in a larger building with a different delivery method. It did require additional positions, things like emergency room nurses that they didn’t have previously.

It also needed some additional positions just as a result of the footprint, how it’s laid out and how they’re going to provide...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, we do have an Official Languages Act here in the Northwest Territories that recognizes 11 official languages, and we attempt to provide services as much as we can in those official languages. If you go to Stanton, by way of example, if you move around that facility you’ll notice that there’s signage for all the official languages in that facility. We try to ensure that official languages are posted in facilities across the Northwest Territories, health facilities. We attempt to have interpreters available to provide language services to individuals who request...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to confirm that the Member is talking about the mental health and addictions line that’s $450,000, just because there are multiple lines here where it falls under.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, some of that will actually be followed up with by the DAAIR and Department of Finance. We have indicated that we’re prepared to have a conversation with the Minister of Health, but ultimately it will be discussions between Finance, DAAIR, and the federal government. I do meet the federal Minister of Health and Social Services with all the other health ministers across the country. I believe our meeting is going to be later this summer. I’m confident that this will be a topic of discussion during that meeting as well.

That is certainly one of the issues. I mean, pension is where the significant cost is going to come from. There is no denying that, but the Hay River collective agreement is different than the UNW collective agreement. We have had some early discussions with union as we are talking about bringing Hay River in, and there are certain things that they wanted to flag and things like seniority are one of them. We have to figure those out. We can’t have two collective agreements if we roll into one authority, so we have toit’s going to take some negotiations. It’s not just a cost thing. It’s a...