Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the Member for his comments. I didn't hear a question, but I will note for the Member that, on this particular page, you will see an increase of $782,000. That is for the Norman Wells health centre and long-term care to help us continue to roll out the services there.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Those are based on demand. Not an increase in the level of coverage, but in the number of people accessing, or possibly the complexity of some of the cases. Many different clinical things could drive those costs. We know the costs are up, and we want to make sure we have the dollars to cover them, so the increase is for that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If the Member were to go back and review Hansard, she would notice that the first indication was, in the first year we got those dollars, we lapsed over $900,000. That was mostly because of the fact that we had to create positions, get positions evaluated, get positions established, and then go out and recruit and attempt to fill those positions. That work does take a bit of time, and, as a result, we did not fill the positions on day one of the fiscal year, and we ended up lapsing $900,000. By the second fiscal year, we had all of the positions established. We had all of...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We have been working for a while with the shelters and the shelter network to develop a funding formula that makes sense. We are not a hundred percent done that work, but we figured we had made enough progress to build a solid business case that would allow us to start making valuable increases in this area, which is why you see the $500,000 increase, which represents about a 15-percent increase overall to the shelters.

What we do know is that a lot of other jurisdictions are only partially funded in this area and that they raise a lot of money on their own, which is true...

We do have a long way to go, as the Member knows. We have a bit of a backlog that we need to work our way through to the point where we can actually have quicker turnaround times on all of our files, to have a standard or a more reasonable wait time for initial assessments, but we need to get rid of some of the backlog. We need to work through some of the backlog.

It is going to be a lot of work. I can't say that we are going to see immediate improvement and a more reasonable wait time immediately. It is going to take us a bit of time, but we are now in a position to start knocking off some of...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am proud of this government. I am proud of the work that everybody in this building does. I think we all do an incredible amount of work in order to improve the lives and well-being of people in our House. I got to tell you; I take great offence to the Member's insults in suggesting that we don't care. I think that the Member's comments are deeply disturbing, deeply frustrating, and I think, frankly, she is insulting every Member of this House, not just myself, but the Members on that side and the Members on that side and, frankly, Mr. Chair, all of the hard-working...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think that the Member did a really great job of explaining the hub-and-spoke model that we are trying to apply in many of the services that we provide.

Like I said before, without moving to a single authority, we wouldn't have had this opportunity. We are still in the early days of contemplating some of these opportunities that have presented themselves by having this new model, and we are excited by some of these opportunities. This is clearly one of them.

$790,000 in the upcoming fiscal year. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, I think it is important to recognize because, if you just added one number to the next, it wouldn't add up, but there have been some sunsets in that area as well. There was a grant in kind to Rockhill Apartments that would have fallen into this line that has been sunsetted. There is a home and community care, mental health and addictions service bilateral funding agreement, $300,000. That is one that is coming back, right? So that will come back, and then there is $542,000 for the Mental Health Act implementation, and that also comes back. Then there is some money that was allocated...

As I indicated, one of the primary things that we did to help with our wait times is we actually created a position in the Beaufort-Delta that will be providing audiology services to both the Beaufort-Delta and the Sahtu. Initially, those services were provided out of Yellowknife by the two different audiologist positions that we had, and they are done by way of travel clinics, five-day travel clinics per year.

Those travel clinics are no longer required, because they will be handled by the audiologist up in the Beaufort-Delta, and those five day clinics that the Yellowknife office was...