Sandy Lee

Almost all of these changes have to do with THAF program that’s expiring, that we had to put in the book as being ended. But we’ve already talked about the fact that we’re working on a contingency plan, but we don’t want to prejudge.

I’m not sure if it’s correct to say that we’re subsidizing this care, because every province and territory is responsible for the delivery of health care to their residents. So whether we get any money from the federal government or not, we would be providing health care to every resident, and doctor care to every resident in the Territories. In the case of aboriginal peoples in the Territories, we get money from the federal government. The federal government’s position is that they are funding for the health care for aboriginal people by this agreement plus the transfer payments that they...

Mr. Chairman, I believe that this is more of an accounting issue. The $5,000 denotes a one-time payment through a contribution agreement to Tlicho Community Services Agency for the Tlicho Healing Wind Sexual Health Terminology Project. The goal of the project was to reduce the incidents of STI in the region. It was a one-time program funding. It was marked in the books for 2006-09 and it would no longer continue, but it doesn’t speak to our programming in language services in the department. It will come later on, I believe. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department does analyze and review data such as the cancer rates in the Territories. My information is that the cancer rates vary across the Territories, but in general, our rates of cancer in the NWT are similar to that of the rest of the country except in colorectal cancer, which is the reason why the government issued a new clinical guideline for screening colorectal cancer more aggressively. Having said that, the information that the Member brought to me is new. I’ve not heard that before, and it’s one that I am interested in looking to see further. We would...

This government spends $320-plus million on health and social services authorities. We provide health and social services dollars across the authorities for them to provide their service. Tsiigehtchic does get doctors’ visits like every other community. I understand in the last year they had some logistical issues and so they had less visits than normal, but this year they are scheduled to have 10 visits to McPherson, 10 visits to Aklavik, 10 visits to Tuktoyaktuk, nine visits to Paulatuk, six visits to Sachs, nine visits to Ulukhaktok and eight visits to Tsiigehtchic. Dr. DeKlerk and his...

This is money we get from DIAND for hospital and doctor care for our aboriginal people. There is NIHB separately later on under 4 and 5, which is a technical language, but I think it’s under extended health. It’s under 8-36. Thank you.

As the Minister of ENR indicated, this is quite new still, new in the process. It is massive, it is substantive, it needs a lot of work. I want to state that we are, our department is involved at the deputy minister level to provide the input and whatever else is needed. Included in that would be our expertise on the delivery of health care and social services, which is obviously a part of the recommendations. So without going into the details of that, because ENR is coordinating it, I think we could say that the department is involved in all aspects of the response through ENR. The Minister...

Broadly speaking, we will first look at what services we have within the Territories, because we do want to keep our residents in the Territories as much as possible. We do know that we have at least a couple dozen patients from the territories in various jurisdictions all across Canada. I’m not aware of anybody that we have sent to the States. The decision on where to send the person will depend on what comparable services are available and we would try to find care for the patient closest to home as much as possible. So we would first look at southern jurisdictions before we would consider...

That is the deputy minister’s specialty area, so I would ask her to answer that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just speaking from a layperson perspective, these TeleSpeech, telehealth machines are big, nice, flat-screen TVs that could be connected to anywhere there is a service provider on the other side. Telehealth was the initial part of that and TeleSpeech is a program that’s offered through telehealth. This is something that would expand as we get more people and more connection from point A to point B. Health care professionals have spoken to me about the possibility of diagnosing through telehealth. Somebody could sit in Deline and talk to a radiologist or neurosurgeon...