Sandy Lee

Mr. Speaker, what I would like to do is just communicate to the Member on the legislation for the department that we have in the type that we are trying to get through and that is quite... I understand every safety issue and every profession, well, many professions have come forward and asked us to regulate. We have to do the major ones first and we are just working really hard to get through those.

As I stated earlier, I have the umbrella or omnibus profession legislation that we are looking at, but it will take some time. It is not something that we could do in the next little while within...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The land tenure issue or whether a building will be leased once built, those are all responsibilities under DPW. We apply for a project under function and once it’s approved, DPW takes care of that. I could undertake to get that information from the Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The current process is that we are part of the, sort of, replacement of small equipment, under $50,000, is it? Capital? But we are working to see if we could have a separate category for medical equipment, because they have different requirements and some of them are urgent. If something goes wrong, we need to be able to replace them, because otherwise our people do need those machines to do things or to do diagnoses or whether it’s an X-ray machine or… Anyway, we are working to separate that and come up with a different evergreening process for medical equipment, and...

This is a time and capacity issue and I think that it’s important to let the people know that those professions that the Member mentions do have professional bodies that they have to belong to and adhere their rules to. I mean, there’s a difference between a registered therapist and other massage therapists, for example.

Mr. Speaker, I don’t believe that we can have this legislation completed within the life of this Assembly, but the Member knows, having been here for more than one Assembly, that there is a list of legislation that moves its way up, and this is added onto that list. Thank you.

Home care worker jobs are not inferior jobs. They’re not part-time jobs. It’s going to be a more important profession. They get schooled to do home care work. They do anything from post-op care or working with persons with disabilities, looking after the elderly, working with the nurses and doctors and looking after their medication. Home care is huge and it’s going to be a more and more important area for taking care of our residents all across Canada.

Those will become, actually I think those are better economic opportunities for our people in small communities where our people in our...

Mr. Chairman, that is the one I was referring to. Thank you.

We are a territorial government, a territorial Assembly. We do territorial planning and we are reviewing the capital budget for the Department of Health this afternoon. Mr. Speaker, it’s all before us. For any additional spaces, we put them in as the funding becomes available. We have done a lot of work in building through planning studies and prototype designs, so that we can move these projects on the books as quickly as possible.

With respect to Yellowknife, there are ways to support these families that are not based out of a facility. Specific to the Member’s constituent, her situation is...

I have had that discussion with the Member and I have undertaken to work with the Housing Corporation. It is the Housing Corporation unit. I know the Member is saying we are not talking about 24/7 level 3-4 care, can we not work together, where the Housing Corporation provides those units available to elders and we have home care and more support there so that elders could use that facility to the extent possible, and I am willing to look at that and I believe that we could do that under the existing policy. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the Member and the Members across have an input. We have a consensus system of government here where we see all of the details of these funding mechanisms.

THAF funding was for five years and it was to expire in March of this year. We were able to extend the program with the federal government, which we appreciate very much. The federal government is supporting us in a big way. But the new funding program or package is not identical to the first THAF. It is an extension and it has a specific criterion that has earmarked all of the money that they are funding. The extension of THAF...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is a program that Yellowknife Health has been funding the Association of Community Living. I believe in talking to the authority, they wanted to engage YACL so that they could have discussions on how to go forward in light of the fact that the funding will expire at the end of 2011. I think we should give them time to discuss and look at options. I believe that is what they are doing. Thank you.