Rylund Johnson

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It's quite clear that the scope of practice of our pharmacists is falling well behind the rest of Canada. And whether that be for emergency prescriptions, prescriptions for minor ailments, adapting in managing prescriptions, ordering lab tests, there is all sorts of things that pharmacists can do in the rest of Canada that they can't do here. So my question for the Minister of health is will we expand the scope of practice for our pharmacists? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Well, after I read this report I hope you'll accept it.

Laughter

Standing Committee on Government Operations report on Bill 62, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, No. 2.

Bill 62, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, No. 2, received second reading on November 2nd, 2022, and was referred to the Standing Committee on Government Operations for review. Bill 62 would amend the Income Tax Act to harmonize this legislation with the federal government as required under the CanadaNorthwest Territories Tax Collection Agreement. Specifically, Bill 62:

Allows the Canada Revenue Agency to share NWTspecific...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We all know we're in a health crisis and getting to see a doctor is harder and harder. And there are many steps we can take but one I would like to speak about today is giving our pharmacists, who go to school for many years and quite frankly often know the drugs they are prescribing better than the doctors themselves, the ability to prescribe basic medications. This is a recommended practice by Health Canada. All ten provinces will be able to provide this service in 2023, including the Yukon. But here in the Northwest Territories, we are falling far behind in what our...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Presently through the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs, we require every single municipality to have an asset management plan. This essentially lists every single asset and piece of infrastructure they own, its operation and maintenance, and then a life cycle replacement cost. And obviously we would require this to be public because we don't let municipalities do things incamera. But the GNWT, as far as I know, doesn't have any asset management plan. The closest thing we have is a 20year capital needs assessment which lists the assets we own and what we...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Our government's open government policy commits to our public service being open by design to build a government that is open by default. And Madam Speaker, it is my experience that the exact opposite is true that, in fact, we are closed by design and closed by default. And this is shown, Madam Speaker, in the repeated requests that myself and committees have made for information that is inevitably either marked confidential or not provided at all. Every year when the capital budget comes forward, I give the same speech about wanting to see the same documents made...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. When the capital budget was first introduced, I had a number of requests that would require my vote, and they were the same requests I've made for repeated years. They're largely ones of information, Madam Speaker. I do appreciate the Minister's new approach to passing more realistic capital budgets. I was informed today we may or may not have an asset management plan; it's certainly something I've never seen. But I'd like to go through what I would expect to be in a capital budget, and it would largely be an asset management plan.

The first question would be, what do...

Yeah, thank you, Madam Speaker. I would just like to rise in support of this motion. I you know, absent legislation being passed in the remaining time in this Assembly, it looks like we're heading into an election with the same boundaries, which I think we all know have some discrepancies in population. And, you know, I don't think it's right for us to wait another eight years to then adjust those again. So by moving this up an Assembly, adding some more members and some better representation, hopefully the next Assembly can have a report and pass one of the recommendations in there.

I also...

Yeah, thank you, Madam Speaker. Yeah, and I'd be very interested to know whether Infrastructure is going to include the projects that don't fall under it. You know, I know we're building quite a number of longterm care facilities under Health and Social Services that not under Infrastructure, as an example.

And lastly, in our capital plan, we get one sentence description of projects, and then what happens is Members kind of ask, you know, what's going on with this playground fencing? Or we just ask these tedious questions that takes us hours and hours of review to get any information out there...

I think I'll have to ask Infrastructure whether they have an asset management plan and will make it public. I'll put them on notice there.

Okay, so my understanding is then we have a fiveyear needs assessment as well which is a bit less of a snapshot in time and that it perhaps some financial thinking has actually gone into it, and if you've made it into the fiveyear needs assessment, probably much more likely to actually be funded. Is this document something the Minister is willing to publish?

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I'd just like to recognize two of our Yellowknife North pages who are here this week Willem Kanigan and Cole Avery. Thank you, guys.