Tom Beaulieu

Again, success rate is something that’s very difficult to identify. I don’t have the information on the number of people who went out for crack cocaine addiction, came back and stayed clean. So I’m assuming that would be the success, because crack, unlike alcohol, is once you’re back into it, you’re back into it and you are no longer successful. So first we determine what success is and then we start looking at the different numbers. Thank you.

Senior safety, for me, is something that is sort of like an emerging issue. That may sound like an unusual response, but when you watch things at a national level, you’re starting to see the very beginnings of what the various provinces are doing to develop a system that tries to keep the seniors safe. Simple things like putting in peepholes, grab bars, alarms and those types of things is what the jurisdictions are working on. We, as the Department of Health and Social Services, in my responsibility for seniors, are looking at those types of things with our other national partners.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A mobile treatment was one of the recommendations of the Minister’s Forum. We think that mobile treatment is certainly a possibility. Mobile treatment has been tried in other jurisdictions. I believe that mobile treatment has also been tried in the Northwest Territories in the past. So far what we’ve done is we’ve recognized that mobile treatment is something that is possible. We are developing a program around what mobile treatment could look like. We’ve talked to Poundmaker’s Lodge, which is a healing lodge in Edmonton, and found out if they have had individuals...

Thank you. No, we’re not doing it chronologically. What we’re doing is we’re trying to address what we consider to be top priorities. The recommendations to debrief the Minister’s Forum, we have talked about putting a group of people together. That group of individuals may actually have met, but I’m not 100 percent sure, so I wouldn’t say that here in the House. But we’ve talked with individuals that could work on debriefing the Minister’s Forum, so we’re approaching this. We’re not going to do it chronologically, for sure, I can assure the Member of that, but we are trying to get through all...

When we discontinued funding to Nats'ejee K'eh, we had indicated to the individual governments, Aboriginal governments that approached us and asked us what we were going to do, we said at this point we had discontinued the funding and now we are working on developing something that’s going to work community by community, and we have promised them that sometime after the end of this fiscal year we would have things in place that would allow individual communities to access funding to run on-the-land programs.

Mr. Speaker, as I indicated in my response, we are going through the recruitment aspect of it. Also as important, if not more important, is the retention aspect of the job. We recognize that we have a high vacancy rate. I think we have a vacancy rate of 26 percent in social workers. I do believe that is the highest number of any particular profession in the health and social services system at this time. Therefore, I have actually met with all of the CEOs at the Joint Senior Management Committee. One of the priorities that I have given to them was to develop a recruitment and retention system...

The department in general, we have an Aboriginal community wellness division; we have money that’s being put into addictions from the House. We’ve got some additional funding to address some of the issues that we laid out in one of the two, either the action plan or the recommendations from the forum. We’re moving ahead in areas that we have been talking about for the last several months since we’ve got the forum’s recommendation. We intend to carry them out. I think we’re moving in that direction. It’s a difficult thing to answer what are you doing to carry out. We’re following the plan...

Thank you. I think we have to really look at the philosophy of on-the-land treatment. We’re asking Aboriginal governments to provide us with proposals on what they see as something that will work for on-the-land treatment for the people, whether they be elders, the youth or families. This is not going to be a program where the government is going to come in with a program and then determine how the program will be set up. On-the-land treatment is something that would be community driven. We’ve received proposals from counsellors in the Sahtu even, and they’re very good, but what we’re trying...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are many vacancies in the Health and Social Services department and health and social services authorities. Specific to the full-time mental health worker in Liard, I don’t have the information on exactly when that individual position would be filled, but we do know that it’s one of the positions we are having difficulties filling. We do have a system that we are trying to employ. The Member referred to Health and Social Services taking over the human resources section to fill the vacant positions. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re expecting that we would...

We would be coming forward through the regulatory process, the business planning process and presenting our full-blown costs for on-the-land treatment to the House. Thank you.