Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m always willing to meet with any group or organization to hear them out and see what we can do in terms of working together. I can tell the Member that I have met with the Stanton Territorial Foundation executive director and chair quite early in my mandate. We have also learned that in fact the deputy minister of Health and Social Services is a member of that board, which has not been exercised in a while. We are certainly willing to work with the foundation and see what projects we can work on together.

Before I begin the Member’s new set of questions, I just want to say the Member is right from the last question that there are two parts to this funding request, the biggest being what’s in front of us now under capital funding for $904,000.

I also want to address why, when we knew this for a year and a half or so, why did this become urgent and is it lack of planning on the department’s part. Mr. Chairman, the answer to that is this came as a surprise to us, but it does happen when a vendor decides that they will not support software, and, obviously, software, the support is important, that...

The input will come from the feedback that we would receive in the town hall meetings. As well, we will be posting questionnaires on the website and we would advertise that so people will be able to go in there. There are some checkbox kind of questions, but there are also spaces where people can write their opinions on the questions they ask. So it will be designed in a way that will allow people to give their feedback on the information they see and what other suggestions they might have. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The meeting being planned is a town hall meeting so that any interested parties can attend. The location and time will be advertised well in advance. I believe it’s on the website and, if not already, will be advertised in the paper and other medium, so that as many people can come and they can have the information in front of us and give us their feedback based on the facts that we have on things like whether there should be some sharing of costs.

We should remember, everybody should know that we’re not talking about the range of benefits that are available. Those are...

I tabled in the House about three weeks ago satisfaction surveys from residents all over the Territories about the services they’re receiving in health centres and hospitals. Over 80 percent of people say they are satisfied with the services they have. It is wrong... I understand the Member would like to have a resident nurse in Tsiigehtchic. A lot of our services, even in bigger communities, are by referral services. We’re not able to have resident doctors, resident nurses, resident radiologists, resident everything in every community. We do spend $326 million for 40,000 people scattered in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. With respect, the information that the Member just read should be read together with other information that we have provided. The information on nurses-in-charge, we know that we’ve had at least 36 weeks of nursing coverage in Tsiigehtchic for a community of 170 people. The Member knows that I am committed to enhancing nursing services in Tsiigehtchic and all the small communities. That is the work we are doing with Foundation for Change. It is wrong when we tell the community members that they don’t have nursing services. We have nursing services in Tsiigehtchic. I...

Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, the Member is absolutely wrong in saying the department is coming up with the plan. I think we’ve learned the last time that coming up with a plan and asking the public to approve the plan did not work. We have learned that. The department staff has been working really hard to gather the data on who the users are, and what their backgrounds are, and what the cost of the services are. We are just providing the raw data. We provided that to the media. We provided that to the committee. We provided that to the public working group and anybody who wants to see...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Member is right; we did make a commitment to have a full consultation process as we went back to work to improve on the information that we had and the discussions that we need to have with the public. We have had that discussion with the public working group as a stakeholder representative. The departmental officials met with them and my information is at the last meeting they had, they wanted the department to come back with more detailed information and this is what they received last Friday. Since then, they have given us feedback that we are...

If we were to, well, I mean, I know that the deputy minister is planning on meeting with the foundation as a member of the board or invited member of the board. With respect to cancer screening, that’s a service issue and it involves... The wait list is not necessarily because of the spacing issue but is because of the lack of specialists. Part of the work we are doing is we’re looking to see if we can offer that service not only in Yellowknife at Stanton but also in Hay River and possibly Inuvik. That’s part of the Territory-wide service plan that we’re working on. We would certainly be happy...

I think the Member may be moving ahead of himself there. I guess we could always ask the individuals, but I think we should also recognize that it’s not entirely the individual’s fault in the way we have such a low rate of people having third-party insurance. We have a system where the government pays for core health care services, which is the case all across Canada and we’re not going to change that. But we have historically covered for all of the extended health benefits that an insurance company would do in southern jurisdictions. So there have been no incentives for residents to seek...