Rylund Johnson

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You know, it's kind of been a long march to one day the GNWT would have a plan to address homelessness. You kind of think it would be something we'd have in the first place, but I'm hoping that the Premier could give us some good news and update the House on when the strategy to address homelessness will be complete? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Can I get an answer so okay, the goal for April 1st to have all the ADMs that I can see on this chart here and all the directors in place. Would that mean that they are all just acting in those roles, or would they actually have been hired to that role through the HR processes? Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, I guess it's my hope that before we approve the budget for this new department, MLAs would be able to see some sort of even if it's the draft before April 1st, detailed organizational chart. I'm going to drill down a little bit more into some questions about that.

Can someone explain to me how we go about deciding you know, presumably I'm looking at this, there's obviously duplications. You can only have one director of finance, you know, and one manager of comms or policy or how you go about deciding and when you will decide who of the duplicate positions gets...

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. I also want to make sure that we're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. We know that a number of our communities have housing plans. We know a few of our Indigenous governments are working on housing plans. I mentioned earlier the Yellowknife the City of Yellowknife created a tenyear plan to end homelessness, which was costed. They really fell behind and then required a lot of federal and GNWT funding to do it. But I think that the framework is there, at least in the Yellowknife model.

Can the Premier speak to how all of those other plans will work into our...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You know, I'm hopeful too that at least a draft will get tabled. I think at some point we seem to have kind of lost sight of the goal, which is, you know in our mandate we're committed to adding a hundred new public housing units, which certainly helps, you know, with homelessness. But the goal is not just to add and maintain our public housing stock. The goal is to actually end homelessness, and I mean that under the definition. I often point to the Yellowknife tenyear plan to end homelessness. I point to the fact that Medicine Hat, which has far more people than the...

Housing, housing, housing, Mr. Speaker. It's all we seem to talk about in this House. And, Mr. Speaker, credit is due that this Assembly has delivered more housing money than we have seen in decades, largely thanks to a lot of federal programs that have rolled out to both the GNWT and Indigenous governments. Yet, Mr. Speaker, we have absolutely no sense whether we have made any progress on ending homelessness in this territory, which ultimately is the goal, Mr. Speaker. And I suspect we have not made any progress at all, Mr. Speaker. I suspect, at best, we are trying as hard as we can against...

There is some funding under the capital project for the transition into the new facility as well as some limited funding in this $8.6 million.

The $844,000 is primarily with a few contractors under our administration or information services, mail chargebacks, Xerox under finance, and some administrative contracts such as French language services, College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Alberta // Renal. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, you know, I think it's safe to say that, you know, $11.9 million of additional money is good but when you have an over $200 million deficit, you know, it's real long way to go.

I was hoping I could just get a brief summary of what the main drivers of the deficit are. I know a number of years ago there was a report; I think it was overtime was a big one. I believe reliance on locums was another one. Outofterritory services. But perhaps if someone can educate me as to what the main drivers are and if you have, you know, kind of how much of a percentage those drivers...

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. So I think it's safe to say we're going to surpass the $200 million mark on our health system deficit.

You know, I get part of that is, you know, being dealt with through or looking for efficiencies and part of that is that we just need some more funding for health in general. Can the Minister speak to the extent the budget we're dealing with for the next fiscal, whether we anticipate that's going to curb the deficit at all? You know, clearly, we're still going to run one but perhaps at least it could plateau instead of increasing every year. Thank you, Madam...