Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll take the Member’s point, but I think it is really hard to get an accurate comparison to take one part out of the government’s budget, say from 1986 or something, and compare it to ours unless we used the same indicators. So I just want to say, modern medicine and health care have changed so we need to know what is included there. People in Tsiigehtchic, they are connected to roads which is different than some of the other communities in the Territories who are not connected by the road and they still get fly-in nursing service.

Mr. Chairman, I understand his...

No, Mr. Chairman. The Member knows that is not going to be solely my decision. What I meant by that is looking at the demographics territorial-wide and looking at how big our senior populations are, and what ages they are, and knowing all of the other indicators that we, as a government, have to prepare for increasing long-term care beds.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There are a couple of issues that the Member raised. The first one about how services were better back in the ‘80s, I do not have information to either accept that or dispute that. I believe, by and large, this government is able to keep records from basically ‘99-2000, because it’s just hard to make comparisons when we’re talking about information prior to division. Anecdotally, I used to work as an executive assistant of the Minister of Health and Social Services for the entire NWT and I think there were as many issues back then as there are now.

On the issue of...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is a lot of work being done on this area and I would like to ask the deputy minister to update the Members. Thank you.

I’m sorry, Mr. Chairman, are we still on 8-17?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On this issue, I, as Minister, committed to the Standing Committee on Social Programs to seek input from the public, obviously. I have just had a substantive update on that. I am going to be seeking to go to Cabinet for Cabinet input. I will also be seeking to go to the Standing Committee on Social Programs as soon as we can organize that. We are ready to do that now and also we need to have consult with the public working group on that. So we are in the process of communicating that to the standing committee, so we can give the committee members an update and seek...

Mr. Chairman, I could tell you that this is something that is of interest to us. It does take two parties to negotiate. We will continue to encourage Nunavut to come to the table on this issue. I will be talking to Minister Curley on this issue as the DMs have been working on it for the last while. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member is right; we do get people dropping in our health centres and hospitals. Anyone who doesn’t have an NWT health card, they would be billed to their host provinces and territories and the billings are determined by national agreements that we talked about earlier. There’s a very set number of dollars that we are allowed to bill each other. So the money is recouped. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to advise the Member that much of what he’s saying is something that we have been discussing and working with and it’s part of the Foundation for Change plan in that we understand that we need to work on the larger framework, like the governance and delivery models but the focus in delivery needs to still be at the community level.

As mentioned earlier by the deputy minister, the recruitment and retention of physicians, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, for example, we have 68-plus positions and we have about 20 vacancies. While we are trying to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know the Member is good, but I don’t know how he got dental care into primary care, but, anyway, I’d be happy to answer him with the information. This dental issue in general comes up everywhere I travel. It is a big issue for our community people, but it’s important for people to know that dental care is not a responsibility of the GNWT. It is not an insured service. It is the federal government that provides dental care to our aboriginal peoples. The non-aboriginal people in the Territories, they get dental coverage by their own insurance. Dental care is not part...