Sandy Lee

I can tell you that my deputy minister is part of that office space review and she will be putting input into that and we are involved. Secondly, absolutely, the hospital owns all the space so when it comes to planning for the building, that would be, obviously, in the equation. I mean, they would look at the entire parking lot and all the surrounding areas to see how they would design the facility. I need to say, once again, that it’s the function before the form. We are trying to determine the functions of the hospital. That is the most important part of that. That’s why it’s taking longer...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I indicated earlier, the homelessness budget we have is really popular. We usually get more applications than we have the money for. I think it is an area that we need to look to see how we can address that. I am talking to the Minister of the Housing Corporation to see how we can partner and put some energy into smaller communities. Yellowknife has been able to build a continuum of services for homelessness, but also… So that’s an area that we need to do. But I need to say that our budget, if you notice, as we stated in the opening statement, has almost… I know it...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Foundation for Change Action Plan has three pillars. One of them is accessibility and that is to make investments and focus our energy on making sure that all of our residents and our health centres have access to the health care that they need. As the Member mentioned, obviously the on-line service and electronic methods of providing health care is one of our priorities. In the last two or three years we have invested about $15 million into the system, and we will continue to work to improve accessibility and services in our small communities. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t know which one is which, but for the one we are building in Yellowknife I would hope that’s not a one-year lease because we have invested in renovating and we expect that clinic to do the work that four other clinics have been doing. We have different leases in different communities for our office as well as health centres. The one in Yellowknife, I’m told, is a 10-year contract. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, it is absolutely fair for you to raise any issues you like. I am happy to respond to them here.

Mr. Chairman, I think it is really important to remember that, for the last four days, we have been talking about the importance of making sure that we use our Health and Social Services dollars wisely. We have a $326 million budget. The needs and demands are endless. On any given day, I have at least a million dollar ask on my desk that I cannot meet. We do spend about $1 million a day. It is a high cost business. We do a very good job, so when I say it is about application, it means...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I can tell all the Members that the only reduction we have through the system is the THAF funding. The government initiative to consolidate fuel costs, we are transferring $7 million to Public Works. So some of that will come out of all of the authorities.

Mr. Chairman, in that issue, I think it would be helpful if the Member could… We have not received a proposal, that I am aware of, from any group or community government. We understand there are not as many NGOs in communities outside of Yellowknife so we do accept and consider applications from community organizations, community bands, the municipal governments. If they want to submit a proposal, we could work together with the organizations, perhaps through also the Deh Cho Health and Social Services Authority so we could discuss more on that and we could give him information on how they...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, it does not.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I take the Member’s point and I stand to be corrected. I don’t have the information from five years back, but I do have the information in front of me for 2008 and 2009 compared to this upcoming year. We had 51 adults in 2008-2009 for 15,000 bed days and for this year we project to have 52 for 11,900 bed days, so we are having about 4,000 less but the cost will be higher because of the costs going up per bed. For children, we had 49 youth in southern facilities, we expect to have 48 this year. Last year we had13,629 bed days and this year we expect to have less, 9,100...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Earlier this week, I think it was yesterday, I made a statement in the House about Drop the Pop, where we did indicate that we were working with the grocery stores across the Territories to help them be our partnerships. We can’t directly tell them what to sell and not. I think the best way is to encourage them to be our partners and understand that there will always be some people who will make choices for pop rather than something healthier, but as much as possible we would work with our partnerships and grocery stores would be one of them. We are expanding our...