Sandy Lee

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman in question no longer lives here but he is an advocate for government’s action to encourage and promote and raise awareness on organ transplant and organ donation. In fact, he was quite surprised at how advanced our personal directive legislation was. He asked for a copy of that because that legislation goes further than other jurisdictions in terms of making options available through living will and personal directives so that people can make choices about whether or not they want to donate organs while they are able to make those decisions, and is not done in the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all, I appreciated the Member’s statement on Stem Cell Challenge as well as the one from Mr. Abernethy. I would like to join them in encouraging everybody in Yellowknife to take the opportunity of this challenge and register and take steps into becoming a donor.

Second, the answer to the Member’s question, Mr. Speaker, the GNWT is part of the National Donor Registry System. We do participate in helping and assisting in that way. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I do agree with the Member that this and other initiatives or services or ideas that the government supports has to be made aware on an ongoing basis. When this personal directive, for example, first came out, there was lots of awareness raising, but I do take the Member’s point that it has to be continuous. The department is lending support to the Stem Cell Challenge for example. We will continue to do that. I take the Member’s point that we have to do that on an ongoing basis. I will get back to the Member on how we do that and how we could do this better. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, as the Member is aware, we are a small jurisdiction and our health care facility or system doesn’t do actual organ transplants or anything like that. This is the reason we work with a national body. We are part of the National Registry System. I believe we have a mechanism in place with personal directives as well as driver’s licence, but I need to confirm that, but I believe we are part of that process. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The information I have is that this RFP went up on the website as is the process. This is the normal process. It went up on May 7th to be closed on May 20th. There were half a dozen inquiries about the RFP. The Beaufort-Delta materials management section noticed that one large supplier in Yellowknife did not inquire about this RFP and, in fact, the Beaufort-Delta Health Authority took it on its own initiative to fax the information to this large supplier a few days later, which is when this business got the fax. The information we have is that the process has been...

My understanding is that if any of those residents could arrive at a repayment plan with the Housing Corporation, their eviction notice could be set aside, and those repayment plans can be for very modest amounts. So if that were to happen, that would avoid eviction.

Mr. Speaker, our staff do work with the Housing Corporation and other agencies to come up with a plan to help if it’s necessary. I would be willing to make sure that our staff in the region knows and sees what resources they could provide. Thank you.

Yes, I will check my notes from that tour and I will review the situation again and I will look at all options to see what is available to us and the Sahtu authority, in consultation with the local leadership. Thank you.

We did tour all of the Sahtu communities and there were a number of issues like this, because Sahtu Health Authority have combined duties of different positions and they’ve had to move positions around to make sure that they are able to use their existing human resource services to provide the services necessary. So I will undertake to take this question about the permanent social worker in Tulita and acquire more information on it and get back to the Member in short order. Thank you.

There is some public interest consideration here. We do need to supply, the Beaufort-Delta needs to supply the medical supplies to these four isolated or off-the-road communities. We need to meet the barge deadline. The tender was out for 20 days. The authority made sure that one major supplier that hadn’t responded was contacted with the information so that everybody had a chance to respond.

Like I stated already, there have been a half dozen inquiries onto the website. The authority did more and went above and beyond to make sure the competition was fair.

The Member is correct that the detailed information on products were catalogue numbers. But we do have a situation where we’ve had a number of businesses responding to this RFP. It would be unfair to those businesses that are interested and have responded, to cancel the RFP now. The Beaufort-Delta Health Authority is aware that they need to do a better job of describing the products and they will do that.

We also have a situation where these are for medical supplies that need to go to communities of Tuktoyaktuk, Paulatuk, Ulukhaktok and Sachs Harbour, and they have to meet the barge deadline...