Julie Green

No. That program has been suspended because of the pandemic.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If people are in distress, they should go to the health centre. The health centre is there for mental and physical health. They should contact the nurse on call and tell them that they are having a mental health crisis. Thank you.

Just first to the Member's other question. Of course, we do have family violence shelters, five of them in the NWT, and a 24/7 crisis line for people experiencing family violence. As you heard when the Minister of housing talked to the Member from Nunakput, freestanding extra places to go and take calls are in vanishingly short supply in small communities. If people are wanting to send documentation to counsellors or other entities, they can go to the government services offices that exist in most communities and they can send faxes or have scans made there in order to provide the necessary...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are vaccinating NWT residents as a priority group. We are not vaccinating non-residents because of the limited supply of vaccine available to us at this point. What we've had in place all along through the pandemic is that people who are going to work in isolated communities, really regardless of what job they are going to do, have to isolate for 14 days in one of the regional hubs and then move on, if they are welcome, in the small community, and there take the precautions that we all do, wash their hands, wear their mask, and so on and so forth.

I feel that the...

I want to emphasize again how seriously the department takes the need to provide a variety of mental health supports to all residents of the NWT. It's my understanding that, in the Member's riding, they don't have resident counsellors in Lutselk'e and Fort Resolution, but they do fly in on a schedule and provide in-person services. Between appointments, they can provide phone and virtual services. In cases where people don't have phones to do follow-up appointments, the department will also look at providing a cell phone for that purpose. Thank you.

We have instituted, as of a year ago, a new way of offering community counselling, which involves no wait time. Instead of scheduling series of appointments for individuals, there are blocks of time that are unscheduled where people can make a same-day appointment or they can make a drop-in appointment. The waiting time for the Community Counselling Program is zero, but for specialized services, such as needing to see a psychiatrist, there may, in fact, be a wait time for that. I can certainly find out what it is and let the Member know.

I realize that there is no easy fix in this area. I don't believe that cultural competency training is optional in the Health and Social Services world. We have committed ourselves to providing culturally sensitive care, in part because of the case that the Member spoke about and other more recent cases that we have heard about on the news. We want to provide a service in which all people in the NWT, whether they are newcomers to the NWT or they have been here since time immemorial, feel comfortable accessing the services that they need to live their best lives. Thank you.

I'd like to think that everybody in our large healthcare facilities, and in our small ones, too, is a navigator who is there to help patients access the care that they come to the hospital or the healthcare centre for. We do have the quality assurance people, although they tend not to be standing in the foyer of the hospital, ready to give advice, but there are people who work at the front desk in the Inuvik Regional Hospital and at the Stanton Territorial Hospital who should be able to direct patients to the places they need to go and to direct them in the language of their choice. We have...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. I take that as a comment.

Again, I thank the Member for Nunakput for bringing this forward. It has been a very difficult time. We know that. There have been many deaths, not because of COVID necessarily but just in the natural course of doing things, and because of the limitation on funerals, the grieving has not taken place in the way we are accustomed to. This has left people feeling at a loose ends. I cannot promise to bring resources to his community, but what I can say is that we will endeavour to fill that counselling position as soon as possible and that, in the meantime, there are phone and video resources...