Julie Green

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you for the question. I think the first thing that we need to do is meet the benchmark of two visits to each school each year. That would be a great start. We have had real trouble recruiting both dentists and dental hygienists in the Northwest Territories. And we have, of course, not given up on doing that but when we put out the requests for proposal in March, we got zero results. And the result is of that is that we are severely underserved by dental health specialists, and that's across the board. And I know that people can go to their health centre and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Member for that additional information. I don't know if any of these therapists are ones who were trained in Fort Smith. I would hope that they would have retired by now but, you know, you never know. So, we have staff assigned to go to communities that don't have therapists or hygienists twice a school year. That's the benchmark of service. Sometimes, I will say upfront, we don't meet that because of staffing and travelrelated issues and school cancellations. But that's what our benchmark is.

Last year the Beaufort Delta and Sahtu regions did not...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, that would be a great topic to bring up with the 20th Assembly who will be doing the next business plan for the 20242025 fiscal year. I think that some of this is a coordination effort. I know that Home Base Yellowknife does enable people to get into leases with landlords and sets youth up in their own housing. I'm not sure whether there is enough of that to make a difference. I think that some youth need significant wraparound resources to be successful as tenants. And so I think all of those are very worthy of consideration. I think for youth as...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, our concern is for youth who have some interaction with child and family services. I think the youth homelessness issue is bigger than that, and it does require a number of parties to come to the table to try and understand the scope of the problem and what the solutions are. I know that there are some resources available now. I'm not familiar with where the gaps are, but that is something that would obviously be useful not only here in Yellowknife, with the largest homelessness population, but in other regional centres. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Member for that. Each region has a regional wellness council with seven members, and they meet every other month or four times a year, and they provide direct feedback to the leadership council of the NTHSSA on what the health needs, gaps, and priorities are in their regions. So that organization, the leadership council, meets four times a year with the chairs of each of the regional wellness councils, and I meet with them every time they meet in order to hear directly from them about what their needs and priorities are. So that's our method for...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this is not program specific funding. There are four areas that the tailored bilaterals cover, and the spending has to be tied to health outcomes that are measured by the Canadian Institute for Health Information. There's some work going on now trying to standardize that reporting because not all jurisdictions collect the same information, and in some cases the collecting of the information is more onerous than the value of the contribution. So there's there's some work going on in that. But generally, what I recall is there is a home and community care...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, Trailcross was used for youth and it will continue to be used for youth in the new pilot program. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate the question. We, as you know, have been working to strengthen both addictions aftercare and detox as to weak links in our continuum of care for people with addictions, and we are less focused at this point on where that's going to take place than what it is we're going to offer. And I think I may have mentioned in the House before that I don't think a single centre will serve the needs of the entire NWT. So Trailcross may end up being part of the solution but I don't think it'll be the whole solution. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we will be doing is to minimize the amount of administration that goes with this money, since it is such a small amount, that we don't want to turn ourselves inside out for it, we already report a number of important statistics to CIHI, which are readily available to the public, on things like wait times, life expectancy, emergency room visits, and so on and so forth. So the amount of money we're receiving is going to not address any of the big problems that our health system faces but rather addresses some incremental problems...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Member for the question. The total increase in health spending for this year from the Government of Canada was $12 million. $12 million. Our budget in the Department of Health and Social Services is $610 million for this year. You can appreciate we were a little underwhelmed. So after being offered $7 million a year for ten years for tailored bilaterals, $2 million for the Canada health transfer one time top up for emergency room and pediatric hospitals, and $2.9 million of incremental funding for the territorial health investment fund, the Premier...