Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources indicated, ENR is the lead department, but there are deputy ministers across departments working to provide the input into the response. At the department level in Health and Social Services, the deputy minister is involved in the response. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, as I have stated, at any time the committee wants to meet with us, we are available. We are ready to give the Member information. I will say it again, that all of the budget items that have gone, that we have talked about in this committee are in our budget to consider. If you would like that identified, we would be happy to do that. Any other documents that the Member wants, I will provide that to him. Thank you.

I think it is important for us to know that this is contingent on the federal budget. We do not prejudge what the federal government is going to do. I would like the federal government to extend this program. We do not want to relieve the federal government of coming up with this by us coming up with plans. We understand that we need to work on a contingency plan. This is why we don’t have it in the budget, but we feel we made a good case to the federal government and Premier Fentie had a private meeting with Mr. Flaherty. The Nunavut government has been pushing this hard. If anything, as...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask Mr. Elkin to provide the details. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I take the Member’s point that part of this paper is just to describe the function of the directorate which does facilities planning. I understand that there is quite a need for long-term care facilities and some other renovations for facilities in health care centres, and that is something that we will be discussing further with the Members and will be looking at community needs to see where to locate this as we move forward in the capital planning process because it is, as you understand... We need to establish the need, we need to get planning money and then work through our capital budget...

Mr. Speaker, I’d be happy to give the Member a list of them, because we have already approved some of them in our capital project last year, and we are into year two and three of those projects. Those are investments in winter roads in the Sahtu area, extending the runway at some of the airports in the Sahtu and other communities. I don’t want to miss out any other communities. We have put investments into the NWT Housing Corporation. We have made investments into income support and power subsidy programs. The money that Minister Miltenberger talked about investing in the Arctic Energy...

Mr. Chairman, in general and some of the highlights are we are funding STI nursing in Yellowknife; community health nurses in Gameti and Sachs Harbour; we have nurse practitioners in Yellowknife, Fort Smith, Tlicho, Deh Cho, Beaufort-Delta; midwifery services, one of the positions is in Fort Smith; continuing care respite services in Yellowknife, Beaufort-Delta, Hay River; Dialysis Program in Stanton; Northern Women’s Health Program in Stanton; ...(inaudible)... community care in Fort Smith, Hay River, Deh Cho and Sahtu; physician staffing, physician recruitment and retention, Physician...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There were a lot of good comments made by the Members yesterday and today. I do appreciate that as we go line by line that there will be more specific questions which I would be happy to answer too.

First, something that I want to mention is the Foundation for Change Action Plan, because it is something that I have been speaking about often and other Members have mentioned. I agree with MLA Groenewegen that we should have a healthier version to having consultant studies and fancy books. I just want to reiterate that this is a working document. It is a to-do list. It is...

The Foundation for Change is a three-year plan. It goes from 2009-12. There is a lot of stuff in there that we are going to move as the money... It’s the changes we could make and supports and funding we can find. Specifically to the accountability framework with regard to the governance and more accountability we can build into the authorities, we are hoping to have those agreements finalized by the end of this fiscal year, not by March 2010, but March 2011 or before that. We are going to be reviewing our contribution agreements and relationship agreements, so we can build in more...

Mr. Chairman, this is a one-time multi-year funding that the federal government agreed to provide to all three territories. An agreement was reached I believe back in 2003 or 2004. The payments didn’t begin to flow until a year later, which is why it is expiring at the end of March. The agreement lasted from 2005 to 2010. It is a $150 million program over five years so it is about $30 million a year. The portions of money that Yukon, Nunavut and NWT get are different. Nunavut gets more money for medical travel than we do and Yukon gets less. There are some other portions to that. It is based...