Julie Green

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I'm not able to give a date at this time for the first resident to move in. What I can say is that I can provide waiting list information. The largest waiting list presently is in the Beaufort Delta. It's 15 individuals. So there is a waitlist I think in almost every location, except for Fort Smith, of somewhere between one and 15 individuals. So obviously we are interested in having the longterm care facilities available.

Our commitment to aging in place has as much to do with home care and supports provided for people to stay in their own homes as it does...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the issues are, as Mr. Heath said, that without knowing which location is the final choice then it's very difficult to estimate the project cost but this is a 75/25 project.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Heath will clarify that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, the budget for this project has changed and the completion date has changed, and I'll ask my colleague Perry Heath to provide some additional detail. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yes, I think the missing piece here is the Stanton Legacy Project, which is partly a longterm care project. And so I'll ask Mr. Heath to provide additional detail on the spending on that project. Thank you

Thank you, Mr. Chair. On my left is Kyla Kakfwi Scott, the assistant deputy minister. And on my right is Perry Heath, the director of Infrastructure.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, first of all, the Member has raised this issue about cancer drugs, and I want to give him a specific answer to this. If somebody has cancer and they're receiving treatment in a hospital, those drugs are provided to the person without any means testing or any charge. If after the cancer treatment there is a prescription that is preventative, like tamoxifen for breast cancer, then that is part of the specified condition list, and it would be captured in this new program. So, again, in response to his points, there is there is consideration for a drug benefit...

Thank you. We're in the information gathering phase, and I'm gratified to say we've been getting a lot of feedback. So we don't have a specific model that we can apply costing to. But given the fact that we're going to include more benefits for more people, we expect the program to cost more. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate the question. I don't see it as a binary situation here. The specified conditions' list covers 54 diseases. If you have ALS, as one example, you're not on that list. You're not getting any help from the government of the NWT. So the starting point was to make the program more equitable for people who not only have drug costs for chronic conditions but they also don't have any drug coverage at all. So that means for the most basic things like antibiotics. So the thing about this is that people and their conditions don't fit into these little silos very...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Department of Health and Social Services is working to make the extended health benefits more equitable. And we put out a number of products here, a discussion paper at FAQ, and a plain language summary, which talks about the supplementary health benefits for low income people, and a drug program for catastrophic costs. The amount of money we're spending right now on this, the 54 specified disease conditions, is $4.3 million, and that's for 1,514 individuals. Thank you.