Julie Green

I am not sure how much PPE we have, but it's useful to learn that there is now a trend towards making it reusable. Can the Minister tell me where in the NWT the supplies are located? Are they all in Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Hay River, or are they in other places, as well?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'm sorry my question wasn't clear. I was talking about contact tracing, where staff call all the people who the infected person has been in touch with to try and figure out who else needs to be tested. What is our capacity for contact tracing in the NWT?

Thank you to the Minister for that answer. It doesn't give me an idea of the size of your stockpile, but let me try to get at it another way. How quickly could the department wrap up testing and provide results if there was an outbreak within a facility like a school or a jail or a small community?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We in the NWT are experiencing a much-needed pause in the pandemic. It's time to reflect on what has happened and to plan for the second wave of COVID-19 which we are told is coming.

Mr. Speaker, I wish I printed my statement out. We ended up sitting in a time of high anxiety. In my family, both my daughter and my partner were tested for COVID and quarantined until the results came back negative. Our family business, the funeral home, has had to adapt to a new way of helping families, because funerals are not allowed. It has been difficult for us and for grieving...

Yes, I'll just finish with a comment. This is really a hopes and prayers section of the budget. We hope that we will be able to advance these three projects to the business case that there will be northern contracting, there will be Indigenous partnerships. I feel like we don't have anything that is super sturdy, here. We just have a lot of hopes and prayers. For something that is so vital to our economy, I would like to see a more proactive or, at least, show me that it's a proactive approach to obtaining more infrastructure money from the federal government. I don't see that now. I hear it's...

Yes, thank you for that information. It doesn't answer my question. My question was that the premise was for funding infrastructure is that there has to be a surplus in the budget; and the surplus is forecasted to go down to a double double at Tim Hortons at 2023, so how is the government going to continue to pay its share of these three projects in the life of this Assembly? Thank you.

Making one project a priority.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I was astounded to hear from the Minister that there is no additional money required for the three infrastructure projects she is promoting, because we only appropriate money a year at a time. Can she reply on that?

Thank you to the Minister for that. Can the Minister just clarify that some of the supplies are in the regions and some of them are here in Yellowknife?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have a few more questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services. I know that, recently, there was a recall on N95 masks. That led me to wonder how much PPE we do have on hand. How many days or weeks, or some other measurement, of PPE is available to us here in the NWT? Thank you.