Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the Member’s consideration or suggestion that we don’t care or we’re not taking this particularly seriously. I would like to suggest that, in fact, we do take this very seriously and are monitoring where appropriate. I can’t say why there isn’t more prevalence or more indication. We do monitor; we do track. I would also suggest that the Member take a closer look at the report, because we do see increased rates in some of our communities. It just doesn’t happen to be in all of our communities. We are tracking, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That is the intent. It is intended to be completed by August 2014.

Madam Chair, on my left is Mike Aumond, deputy minister of Finance; on my right, Sandy Kalgutkar, deputy secretary to the FMB. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member is asking a question that I think a significant number of other individuals have been asking. The building will be assessed and go through the disposal process as usual, which may include, if appropriate and if the building has any life left into it, repurposing or tear down, depending on the nature and state of that building.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I am here to present Supplementary Estimates (Infrastructure Expenditures), No. 3, 2014-2015. This document provides for an increase of $58.515 million to the capital budget.

The most significant item in this supplementary estimates is $58 million in capital carry-overs for the completion of infrastructure projects. This represents a carry-over of 21.3 percent of the previous year’s capital plan, our lowest in the past 10 years. These costs are offset by an equivalent lapse of infrastructure funding in the 2013-2014 fiscal year.

I am prepared to review the details of the...

With respect to Stanton, there has been a significantly complex process where we’ve involved many professionals including health practitioners who are currently using the building so that we can have a really solid plan of care as part of our planning study and so that the building would meet our future and current needs. We’ve built hospitals and health centres before and we recognize that there are challenges in doing that.

By way of example, we did a major upgrade to the health centre in Fort Smith, and it was like this project given that we continued to provide services in that building...

Thank you. Through the Pharmacy Act, with the amendment to the Pharmacy Act we’ll be able to track what has been dispensed. The interpretation of that data will have to be done and we’ll have to come up with some policies to figure out how to do the interpretation of that data so that we can try to understand where the abuses are occurring. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I hear the Member clearly and I share the same concerns. I don’t believe we’re in jeopardy of losing those dollars at this point. The primary delay in the EMR project has been due to extensive contract negotiations with the vendor. These negotiations included the creation of a new pricing model to reflect a health care delivery model in the Northwest Territories which is different than most other jurisdictions, and we had to work on defining the requirements for NWT-specific functionality in our environment where we have the certain technology that we do. Due to these...

Thank you. In the winter session there was some debate back and forth between myself and MLA Dolynny from Range Lake about our ability to monitor, and the Member did identify a large number of pieces of legislation and indicated that we can do a monitoring program. I was listening very closely to what the Member was saying and I asked the department for a comprehensive legal opinion on whether or not we could, and the department and the lawyers pointed out that we can’t take individual pieces of legislation and think about them independently. We have to look at how they crosslink. The bottom...

For the $98,000 its installing an electrically assisted door opening mechanism on the public wheelchair accessible washroom door and on the door to the wheelchair accessible washroom in the hallway behind the Chamber. This is estimated about $22,500. Installing an electrically assisted door opening mechanism on glass doors to Committee Room A and the library, which is estimated at $49,000. Install a companion seat in each of the two wheelchair access visitors galleries, which are up there and up there. Estimated cost is $11,500. Remove the glass door leading to the public washroom altogether...