Sandy Lee

We do that already. We work closely with the Housing Corporation. So if the Member has specific situations or a constituent that she would like me to look into, I would be happy to do that. As I’ve stated, the Housing Corporation does have a program that addresses the persons with disabilities and, of course, Health and Social Services works closely with ECE and Housing and Justice or whoever we need to.

The program change at Joe Greenland Centre is to use the facility for what it was really meant to be. It was not designed for level III and IV care that we’ve delivered there for the last number of years. Since 2007 we’ve had very few residents there.

When this wing is renovated and converted into independent units, we don’t anticipate that we will have staff in that building. It will be like the other wing. There will be a caretaker and that sort of support.

What we anticipate is to expand the Elders Program for the entire community. Right now for the entire community of Aklavik there’s one...

We have, I believe, 62 positions dealing with mental health and addictions already. There is underground support for that work. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Graduate Placement Program is being delivered by HR on our behalf and we work with HR to address the issues that the Member is speaking about. When the nurses graduate from the college program, they need additional on-the-job training and often they work in Stanton because they do want to have some emergency and hospital setting so they become more comprehensively trained and be ready to go out to communities, because a community health nurse needs a different set of skills that they might learn; well, additional skills than what they learn in the school setting and...

Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the Member’s comments on that. This initiative is part of our Building Our Future Strategic Initiative Committee project and Ministers across departments and deputy ministers sit in this group. I will undertake to follow up on that evaluation suggestion and follow up with the Member on that.

I just want to add one more note about this Small Community Homelessness Funding. I take the Member’s point, but just going back to the history, those programs were set up precisely to address the needs of small communities that didn’t have shelters. I understand...

Mr. Speaker, this is an across-the-department approach and our director of policy is part of the steering committee. We provide our input, our expertise, our information into that group and obviously being involved in the...and the response and coming up with this response to the workshops and conferences and the interest that the Members in this House as well as the public have indicated to us as to the need to come up with this strategy. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As I indicated, we’ve completed our internal work. We would like to get them out to the public. I’m just wanting to let everybody know that the framework within which we’ve been working on is the recommendations from the Joint Working Group report. At this point, having heard what we have heard, we are not anticipating coming out with a whole new policy or making sweeping changes. What we are trying to do is do what we can within the existing policy framework and to try to accommodate some of the recommendations that were brought up by the Joint Working Group. I...

I’m not sure if it’s something that we could be speaking about here, but I’ll be happy to get the Member details privately.

Yes, I have. We have had the CFSA recommendations since October. My department and I went through the report, we reviewed them and we came up with every possible way of implementing as many recommendations as possible. There are some items that are big ticket items and we needed to put that into the next business cycle.

Having said that, I understand that the Members would like us to relook at it. I think it’s really important for all the Members here to have the full information about what re-profiling means, a $12 million item. My department is working right now to give the information to all...

It will be in the context of working with the recommendations from the Joint Working Group report, which is out there in the public. So we are responding to the direction from the Legislature by way of that committee report. Thank you.