Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I give notice that on Wednesday, March 3, 2010, I will move that Bill 1, An Act to Amend the Veterinary Profession Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

When a family who is going through distress or, for some reason, are not able to provide safety and protection to a child, the social workers will work to see where else they can find support within the community. They would look to the extended families like grandparents or aunts or any other family members that could give that support. Obviously, we have more stats for those children who have to be taken out of the family setting and we would first look to extended families to take care of those children. We would look for families within the community and when they are assigned with those...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There’s a lot of difference between Rio Tinto or BHP and the public health system. Our system is demand driven. People put the highest priority on their health and social services. On a daily basis, whether it’s Friday night, Saturday morning, midnight, I get calls from Members and the general public asking us to do something more for health and social services or extra services they would like. You cannot compare a health care system to a private corporation who needs to check the bottom line all the time. We have finance people in our authorities and our department...

On the substance of it I do feel that’s what the NWT Seniors’ Society and other elders that we work with I believe fulfill that function. If the Member has a more specific proposal or idea that he wants to discuss further, I’d be happy to sit down with him and listen to him and perhaps other Members. But there is no question that in our day-to-day work that we do rely on elders, not only grandmothers but grandfathers and leaders of our communities, to help us do our work.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The entire health and social services system is geared towards making sure that we use our health and social services dollars to the people in need. On any given day I have every Member of this House come and talk to me about the things we need to do for our people: medical travel, different services, different care, different institutions they should go to, different treatment. The fact is that health and social services is a high-demand field. We put a great deal of priority on spending our dollars in the health and social services field, but we’re also aware that we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was here when the former Minister of Health and Social Services, Mrs. Groenewegen, came up with the idea, which I thought was a great idea until it got outside of the building. Then we ran into problems because there are lots of people out there who feel that they’re grandmothers should belong to this group. Of course, we can’t have all the grandmothers meeting in a group all the time of that size.

My approach has been to work with the NWT Seniors’ Society, which is a group made up of elders from across the Territories, big and small. There are about six, seven or...

I realize that for some out there this could be studied for 10 years. I’ve been here for 10 years. This Supplementary Health Benefits Policy was studied for seven years, that I was here in 2007, before changes were brought about. Mr. Speaker, the Member is right; the last motion was in April, but I believe we set after the motion was passed. We worked on it through the summer and the fall. Perhaps, for some, we could spend 10 years studying this before any changes are made.

Mr. Speaker, I believe it’s a judgment call. I believe it was more important that we go out with the profile of the...

We bill for the services that we provide to Nunavut. Once again, supplementary health benefit discussions are not about cutting services in supplementary. We continue to and will have one of the best, if not the best, Supplementary Health Benefits Program anywhere in the country. We will continue to do that. The way the rules are written are quite outdated and the user profile shows that we need to look at other considerations such as affordability to pay, as one of the factors in determining who accesses this very generous and important program that we offer.

I want to say clearly that we are not looking at reducing costs. In health care services it’s about making sure that our system works well so that we plan for the future. The health care budget in this government continues to grow and we expect that it will continue to grow and that we will continue to spend the money that we need for the health and social services system.

The review of supplementary health benefits is different. It’s been around for a long time and we have very good information about who is using it and what the people’s backgrounds are, and that there is not as much fairness...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Before I answer his question I need to correct some of the things that he stated. First, that somehow through private insurers the government can charge any companies for providing core service. In Canada, the Canadian government and the provincial and territorial governments are responsible for core services and we couldn’t recoup that from a private insurance company. Any private insurance company that offers benefits will be supplementary to the core service.

Secondly, that Nunavut residents have a prior service. That is misleading, Mr. Speaker. All the governments...