Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Mental Health and Addictions Action Plan that came out from the Department of Health and Social Services moves a long way to supporting the recommendations that are in the Minister’s Forum.

We do have community counsellors in most of the communities in the Northwest Territories who can provide direct counselling, whether its addictions related or whether its mental health related. There’s also NWT Helpline that we strongly encourage people to call if they’re unable to talk to anybody else. In the communities they’d have nurses. The nurses are also there to provide...

Mr. Chair, for the specific detail on the action items and what’s happening, when we hope to have some of them available, I will go to the deputy minister for that detail.

Mr. Chair, during the hiatus between May and September, Yellowknife Health and Social Services actually went out and did a number of engagements with the public and other individuals about what types of programs and services they expected or would like to see, including actual conversations with the homeless people who happen to use the shelter, probably the best people to talk to about the types of things they wanted. That has helped to form some of the things that are going to be taking place.

There are a lot of significant changes between the old Day Shelter and the Day Shelter that we have...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m not prepared to speak about a specific individual or specific case at this time. I will say that in 2011 there was an inquiry called on by the Department of Health and Social Services to look at the security and other issues at Stanton, and at that time a number of improvements were made to the security operations within Stanton, including more security in emergency. They increased the coverage in emergency. They installed some doors, locks and alarms so individuals can’t get into secure areas of the building like the kitchen, and they approved some of the...

Thank you, Madam Chair. CIHI is fairly structured in how they report information and they request information from us on all their indicators, and we provide them every piece of detail that we can. Then they go through their analysis process and present their information. They present it in different categories such as hospital-based categories as well as a territorial category. Some information at a territory level, our numbers are such that they can be recorded. Whereas maybe at a hospital level, if they’re too small then they’d be self-identifying so that they may not be reportable. They...

Thanks, Madam Chair. These are numbers based on budgets provided by the individual authorities, but the Member is correct, we have run deficits in the health authorities in the past. Just for the record, a number of the areas for increase in this particular area include the service centre costs as well as the Microsoft licensing costs, some Collective Agreement costs and other costs that are associated with the health and social services authority funding in the area of administrative support. You’ll notice, as we go through this binder, there’s going to be several areas where money is needed...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Before somebody goes out for treatment, and one of the residential treatment facilities that we’re currently working with, they do agree to, when they return, contact or be contacted by the community counsellor. So, there are community counsellors who are providing some degree of after-care.

There are also other opportunities. We know, and we don’t believe that we should be administering it or running it, that AA is a valuable program, but the reason it’s effective is because it’s a non-government sort of member-driven organization. We do know that there is some...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A number of the programs that we deliver are not age specific. The NWT Helpline is available to youth. We have some specific suicide intervention programming and training that we’re trying to get into the schools and I believe we’ll be able to get into a number of the schools this year. There’s a number of programs that are available for youth, but all the programs are available for youth as well. Thank you.

We’re quite excited about the Mackenzie Valley Fibre Optic Link. We believe it’s going to help enhance the services that we already have, and our first focus is to make sure that the tools that we have in place – EMR imaging, lab services – that we currently try to provide over the Internet are enhanced as a first priority and make sure we get maximum benefit out of those programs that we have. We also believe it’s going to support and help us with things like telehealth because we’ll have a better link and better time, better connection.

We also know and we’ve had an opportunity to look at...

Yes, that is actually going to be in the act. The reason we don’t believe it’s going to cost us significant money, the reason we could manage within, is because we are finding ways today to provide some of those services whether it’s through voluntary approaches or otherwise. This is going to give us more ability to do it in a formal way, but we don’t believe it’s going to cost significantly more money.