Thank you, Mr. Bromley. I have the same copy as the Members do, so I can answer that. I will undertake to get that information for you.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate that this is an issue where the Member has concerns, not specifically with Health and Social Services alone but government-wide. I believe the answer has been given in that regard, in that a decision was made to notify the employees of their potential impacted status. Then the choices are given to the employees to see whether they want to pursue other options. I do understand there are affected employees who have chosen not to do that. That’s their option as well.

As the Member is aware, the principle behind it and the good intention behind it was so that instead of...

My information is that we do not know of any NPs trained in the North who have left. I got a motion from one of our Members, who knows there might have been one. I will undertake to look into that further and get back to the Member.

Mr. Speaker, I want to say, for the record, that I appreciated the opportunity to see first-hand and hear first-hand the challenges that the residents in small communities have with respect to dental care. For our aboriginal people it is covered by the NIHB services, but we have not been able to obtain service providers. There are lots of dentists and dental clinics in the North who have not taken up the opportunity to bid on this contract, in particular for the Deh Cho region. They had a challenge in obtaining a contract, and I believe only in the last month were they able to find a dentist...

We estimate that this year’s expenditure will be at about $41 million, and the expenditures we could claim as per the agreement will be about $25.6 million, which gives us a gap of about $15 million a year.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is the third month of ’08–09. We are, as the deputy minister indicated earlier, engaged in restructuring of the department, where the health side of the mandate is more specifically laid out. This is probably my layperson’s explanation of that. I could have the deputy minister explain more of that.

We do have the remaining nine months to finish reorganizing the department and to make sure we do more in-depth research into how to re-profile and realign the positions so we minimize the impact on the programs and services.

I could ask the deputy minister for more...

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. May 18, 2008, marks the four-year anniversary of the Tele-Care Health Line service. This 24-7 telephone service provides family health and support information to the residents of the NWT through the Tele-Care Health Line call centre.

The volume of calls through this service has steadily increased in four years, from 4,019 in 2004–2005 to 5,923 in 2007–2008. A total of 20,374 calls have been received since the service first began. As a result, we can statistically assume that 5,417 individuals have participated in self-care activities that may have reduced the pressure on...

I’ll get that for the Member.

Mr. Chairman, absolutely. I think that’s what I’ve been saying. Once again, there are 17 positions impacted in the Department of Health and Social Services. It’s all in the department, not in the authorities. Out of 17, nine positions were vacant, which means there are no active bodies impacted there. Out of those impacted 17 positions…. In six positions there were incumbents there, and most of them have been reassigned or they have places to go.

We looked at whether there were vacant positions, whether any of those positions could be rewritten or re-profiled so it did not impact the program...