Sandy Lee

Mr. Chairman, that option is there but what I was speaking about is the fact that we are not going to have strength of a policy change to do the things that we had wanted to do under the Supplementary Health Policy. It was a package under the policy and the policy has been rescinded. Encouraging or asking companies to provide insurance is one option, but without policy change or more weight behind it, it will remain an encouragement.

Yesterday much of the discussion was about more direct involvement and interventional role by this government. I was saying that to do that, it will need a new...

Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I am going to have to take that comment under advisement. I ‘m sorry; I’ll have to follow up. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, it has to go without saying that our system would rather hire our own local nurses before we would have agency nurses or locum nurses. So if there are any jobs that are...

Mr. Speaker, as I’ve stated, if the Member would listen, these nurse graduates don’t go through a regular hiring process; they go through a Graduate Employment Program. They go through a separate preferential program that the government has organized with HR, and HR people are talking to the graduating class. We are going to have a list of positions that could be matched up with them.

So, Mr. Speaker, I want to...

Mr. Chairman, I know the Member... This is one of the number of items that we discussed in the standing committee. I just want to make it clear that, as I stated yesterday, I am fully committed to looking at all of the suggestions that the committee made yesterday.

I just need the committee to understand that the response is government’s response and any changes or reconsiderations of budget will be a Cabinet direction. Our department is analyzing those recommendations right now. I will get back to the committee on how we go about with the options. I am not trying to evade; I understand what...

Yes, please. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I need to have my deputy minister give the information, as it’s operational.

Thank you. We are in communication with the graduating class of nurses at Aurora College. They are made aware that they wouldn’t be applying for jobs on the website, that they will be eligible to join the Graduate Employment Program process, that we will have a list of jobs available for them. HR and HSSA, Department of Health staff, are going in there to talk to the nursing graduates and we will be working with them to find placements for them. They will be asked to give their preference of what communities they would like to practice in. We want to match those, but those are not always...

Thank you. I just want to thank the Member for the comment. Yes, this is an ongoing challenge that we need to work on, but I just want to add to our discussions here some of the things that people involved with the Family Violence Coalition, Lydia Bardak was on the radio this morning speaking about… We rely on NGOs to help us with this. I think the government has undertaken a number of initiatives to combat family violence at different levels, whether it be through the courts or enhancing shelter money, working with children who witness violence, there’s an initiative to work with men who...

Mr. Speaker, I don’t think there is any disagreement between the Member and myself that there are more demands than resources available. I am thinking that the Member is thinking that I should just go and build some more or something like that.

The way the programs are being delivered, we have lots of providers. We have NGOs who have group homes. We don’t build housing. It is really about resources. It is not about lack of policy or programs or intent. We have more demands and supply and on a case-by-case basis, we work on our residents and we assess them. We place them where we can and we try...

As I stated, there is no substantial increase to anything in our budget because it’s, as people have called it, a status quo maintenance kind of budget under our fiscal circumstance.

With respect to suicide prevention work, we are doing some new work under this initiative. We have obtained some funding with the Mental Health Commission, which is a body set up nationally, and we’ve been getting some money for the last couple of years. This year we will be flowing $460,000 in federal funding for community-based suicide prevention projects. One of the initiatives that we are embarking on is to set...