Julie Green

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the CYCCs are available to talk about a broad range of issues that youth encounter, whether that is drug use and abuse, family violence, negative social interactions, and so on. They are there to support the students and talk to them about the issues that are of concern to them, and that would include drug use. So we have various media campaigns that dissuade or attempt to dissuade people from using drugs, and those would be available to the people in the Tlicho region as they are every other part of the NWT. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Mr. Speaker, I don't have a firm idea of what the deficit will be. I know that we're paying more for travel; we're paying more for freight; we're paying more for drugs; we're paying more for staff, especially because we have so much temporary staff and they are expensive to acquire and work here. So I am very concerned about all those things that are driving costs up. And on the other side, there is uncertainty about the revenue that we're going to get from Canada through the CHT and the tailored bilaterals, whether they're going to renew the Territorial Health Investment Fund...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, yesterday during the mains examination of the department, I committed to a confidential briefing to the committee on accountability and oversight of the NTHSSA finances, what savings have been realized, what pressures are driving costs up, and so I'm going to repeat that here again today. At a very high level, it can be included in the annual report. But my caution about that is that the annual report won't be out until the fall, and it won't cover anything that happens after the end of this month. So the timeliness of that document is not great. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this evaluation is not at that point and this is not the forum for HR. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the CYCC program was developed with feedback from a wide variety of people, including students, parents, health authorities, and others. And so we're going back to that group and asking them what they think the strengths and weaknesses of this program is, and particularly the extent to which it is achieving its goal of improving access to mental wellness supports for youth. So the evaluation there was a portion of it that began last year with staff who were leaving in the last school year and continuing on now with the public engagement period. And rather...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, the deficit for the last fiscal year is $33.7 million. It was driven by the following factors:

Compensation and benefits, including overtime. Staff relocation and removal and call backs;

Secondly, physician services;

Thirdly, chemotherapy drugs;

Fourthly, foster care and voluntary service supports; and.

Fifth, health services that were transferred to the correctional facilities during that year.

We don't have that broken down by percentage. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, for the record, most of these funds have a onepage application and the reporting on it is as simple. But what I've heard at the bilateral tables with Indigenous governments is that they often even lack the capacity to come up with a proposal. So the paperwork is not really the problem. It's once they get the money how are they going to spend it.

One thing that the NWT Council of Leaders asked the Department of Health and Social Services for was to create block funding with some of these funds, particularly mental wellness and addictions recovery, peer...

Thank you. I'll ask the director of finance to answer, please.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, let me say initially that this isn't just a Hay River problem. With a 45 percent vacancy rate, there is a doctor shortage throughout the whole of the NWT. We continue to actively recruit doctors, and we have had some success but, ultimately, we still do have a large vacancy rate. So there's no way I can commit to immediately providing the seven doctors allocated to Hay River Health and Social Services. The best thing that can happen here is for word of mouth from existing physicians and medical people to their networks to encourage them to give the NWT a...

Okay, I'm trying to grab the question. So where we don't have resident doctors to provide specialized services, people are sent south for treatment. So most recently you would have heard about the rheumatology program. There was a regular visitor rheumatologist who became unavailable. And the result of that is we were unable to hire another resident or longterm rheumatologist and so people are going south to receive treatment. We decided that that provided the best continuity of care. So I think that more than anything, the situation with rheumatology points to how fragile our health system is...