Tom Beaulieu

Thank you. Most of it is common sense. The reduction in medical travel will happen, yes, if you had midwives in Yellowknife. However, right now people are coming to Yellowknife to have babies. People are coming to Inuvik to have babies. That’s not going to change. Whether the midwives are in Inuvik or the midwives are in Yellowknife, that’s not changing. The people are still coming here. There’s still medical travel to come here. So that’s the territorial program, same with Inuvik.

Now in Fort Smith, about half of the people that are having babies in Fort Smith are still coming to Yellowknife...

Thank you. The actual discussions are between Municipal and Community Affairs, Public Works and ourselves with the federal government.

Thank you, Madam Chair. There are several reports. Some we may possibly be able to share. We may be able to share all the reports but this is proprietary. Some of the reports may be proprietary information. We’ll share what we can with committee.

I am familiar with the report, I don’t have all the details of the report, but I do have enough details in the report to move forward in the direction that the department is taking it. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are very close to having the land tenure sorted out with ANSI and we’re very close. They didn’t want to proceed on dealing with the land tenure issue until the project was substantially complete. So this is what we’ve done. We’ve completed the facility as of August 2012, this past August the unit was considered to be final and, therefore, we’ve moved with the Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada in the process of finalizing land tenure and we are at the very final stage where we’re expecting to have that resolved very soon. I can’t give the exact date...

Okay. Then in 2015-2016 we’re expecting the first actual construction in the Stanton Hospital, for allocation there of $20 million. However, it’s important to note that this has to go through the capital planning process and through the House at the appropriate time when we talk about capital.

We began a media campaign in December to advise people that we’re moving to the system where their health care card expires on their birthday. These are health care cards that would have been in place for three years, and then expiring on their birthdays starting this year and then more in the coming years. What has happened is, because there have been issues where there are indications that individuals that are holding health care cards that are not eligible that are outside the province, we wanted to have a clean process when we transfer into the new system that we’re requiring that people...

Madam Chair, we will work on this as I agreed to do. I’ve only mentioned a few of the issues that we have to deal with. Even the privacy of individual files has to be something that we would deal with BC Health. We will try to employ the same type of systems that we do when we deal with Alberta Health and British Columbia, for the most part, but… As we do with Alberta, pardon me. For the most part, we will try to do that, but then BC Health also has their own regulations and restrictions on how they deal with patients. Those are things that we do have to deal with.

The Health and Social Services system is a fairly decentralized operation. We do try to place positions outside Yellowknife. We do that test each time there is a position that does not necessarily have to be located near the centre. In this case, as this position works with all authorities, it can be located anywhere the individual wishes to live, depending on who applies and who gets the actual job.

Unfortunately, if you show up with expired health care, you will not get insured coverage. However, you do have four months after that grace period to renew your health care card.