Julie Green

The problem with rapid testing is that it really doesn't work if you only do it once. There is a period of time over which somebody could become infectious, have symptoms, have a fever, so you can't really do one test and say, "Okay. That's good. You don't have any COVID." It's usually a series during the 14-day isolation period. I know that what they're doing now with essential health workers is a test right when they come in to see that they're well, and then they're asking them to really self-isolate except for those times that they are at work. There is a model to follow there that may be...

With respect to the road to the mines, it's a private road, and there is a dispatch office in the industrial area of Yellowknife that truckers go to to be dispatched. They leave at specific time intervals a numbers of trucks at a time. That would continue. It's a private road, so they would continue doing that. They have security on that road. I know that they are vigilant about the speed limit and how many hours the driver has been on the road and so on and so forth. For the rest of the territory, I think that the enforcement would be maintained through the current border controls that are in...

These different domains speak to a whole-of-government approach. For example, impaired driving countermeasures would involve the Department of Justice; marketing and advertising controls would probably involve the Department of Finance, where the liquor commission is housed there; pricing and taxation and the physical availability of alcohol are also Department of Finance issues; Justice may take on the minimum legal drinking age, which is another recommendation in this set of issues to look at. It's going to be important for the department of health, as the lead on this, to bring all these...

I see engagement as a real issue even if there was no COVID. The difficult thing will be to find people with lived experience to participate in the engagement to talk about what will or could have helped them at some point in their journey. I don't have the details of how that engagement strategy is going to work, but I do recognize that hearing from people with lived experience would be a very valuable part of it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I have a Return to Oral Question asked by the Member of Deh Cho on October 16, 2020, regarding long-term care facility.

The former health centre building in Fort Providence was deemed surplus by the department when the new health and social services centre was constructed. It was determined by Department of Health and Social Services and the Department of Infrastructure that the building had reached the end of its useful life from both a technical and program perspective. It would have been cost prohibitive to upgrade the facility and meet current healthcare design and...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I wish to table the following four documents: "NWT Health and Social Services System Annual Report 2019-2020;" "Tlicho Community Services Agency Health and Social Services Annual Report 2019-2020;" "2019-2020 Annual Report of the Northwest Territories Health and Social Services Authority;" and "Hay River Health and Social Services Authority Annual Report 2019-2020." Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I'm sorry. I don't have that information. That information we would need to obtain from the NIHB, both the numbers of patients and the cost of the service.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and thank you for the question. The department doesn't restrict dentists from going into small communities. The issue at the moment is about infection control in some of the health centres where they are not adequate to meet the challenges of COVID-19. There hasn't been as much travel as there was previously. As an alternative, emergency cases are being flown to Yellowknife for service. Thank you.

We do now collaborate with other government departments in order to provide services to seniors, but we could be doing better. For example, I am very interested to see whether it's possible to have a common application for all seniors' services across all government departments, rather than having seniors having to apply to each government department for the service that they require. That is the kind of initiative that I'm looking at going forward. Of course, there is a lot of work related to seniors going on now around our priority to have seniors age in place with dignity. That involves...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. There will be an elders' strategy developed within this Assembly. Thank you.