Julie Green

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wonder if the Member can point to anything that is cheaper in the NWT than it is anywhere else in the country, and that certainly is true for health as well. So what happens here is that several factors come into play to determine the cost of services and fees. They're set on a cost recovery basis. We're not trying to profit from this. But, for example, if chest xrays are required as part of the medical exam, they must be sent to Alberta for review, and we have to pay the cost of both sending them and having the review done.

So this is an additional cost that may not...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as the Member has referenced, the immigration medicals are driven by the federal government as they are the primary regulator of immigration. And as she said, NTHSSA can't assign physicians to immigration to IRCC panels. But we are working with the federal government to have physicians added to the list of paneled physicians who can do immigration medicals, which I just have to say are quite involved. They are maybe not your standard medical as you may have experienced it in your life.

It is in fact possible to have an IRCC medical performed in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I feel like I would like to consult my colleague, the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, to provide a full response on that. I don't have that information off the top of my head. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. I just went over the general list, the community counselling program, which I just mentioned, and the fact that it is now transformed into a sameday service. There are child and youth care counsellors which are offered jointly with ECE in the schools which provide support to youth. There are the Emental health options which I just mentioned, Wagon, but there are others. There are facilitiesbased addictions treatment. There are no facilities in the NWT so these are facilities in the south which we contract and people attend.

We have psychiatric care and treatment available in the...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thanks to the Member for that question. The focus recently in Health and Social Services has been to provide communitybased funds that have specific applications for services and programs that communities or Indigenous governments, in some cases municipal governments and NGOs, can apply for to create service delivery in their communities.

So this year we announced an addictions recovery and aftercare fund which can be accessed for hiring communitybased counsellors, and those counsellors could support two kinds of projects:

Projects that support individuals...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, following the home and community care review, which was completed and presented to the Members of the Standing Committee on Social Development in the summer of 2020, we've invested in oversight for home support workers to try and develop standards and scope of practice for these positions. So we've been looking at, for example, what kind of clinical supports people need who have complex needs, expanded hours of service as the Member mentioned, and how to meet the needs of the growing population of people who prefer to age in place.

In the Beaufort Delta...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Member for the question. We have some loose ends in this project which we need to tie up before we can provide a specific dollar estimate of the savings.

The analysis that's underway right now is whether it is feasible to attach an extension to the current longterm care at the Inuvik Regional Hospital or whether it would be more effective to build a standalone facility. So this is something that engineering and geotechnical work is looking at evaluating. We do, because we've gone from 48 beds to 16 beds, in any case expect some reduction in the cost...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as an immigrant myself, I appreciate and value the role of immigration in our society in building our society, providing a skilled workforce. As you may know, my family came here, my dad is a plumber or was at the time we came, a plumber, and we had to go through all these hoops back in the day. And so we want to make things as efficient as possible. But as I said earlier, there are some limitations on what we can do as a territory where this is a federal jurisdiction. And so I'm not able at this time to say that we will match the current fee structure...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I mentioned, we're in discussions with the federal government on this topic. I don't feel like I'm in a position at this time to make a commitment on service standards. But I do take the Member's point that the service turnaround time is putting undue stress on people who are counting on that turnaround time in order to secure their immigration status. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'm going to give a really quick answer. No.