Tom Beaulieu

That would be quite a team alright. We would be able to work with that, I believe. What I will do is, again, take it back to Cabinet colleagues. We do have a Cabinet committee in the social envelope. So we can take it back to the chair of that committee with the Department of Justice and, hopefully, as we move along, we will also keep the Standing Committee on Social Programs informed as we move forward. Thank you.

Thank you. Some of the actions would be some of the mental health first aid, some of the actions where we’re trying to improve efficiency of services is as simple as having discussions. Just to be able to allow the students to talk about mental health, that is within our action plan. This is a fairly complex issue coupled with fairly complex processes that involve a couple of departments for us, as a department, working through our authorities to enter into the schools with mental health counsellors, we have to first do some evaluations of students. Students, in order to be evaluated, it has...

Madam Speaker, I think the department recognizes that, along with the authorities, this is sort of like an issue that is a looming issue right across the territory with youth. Whether or not we are going into the schools to do the counselling, it’s not as simple as the Department of Health and Social Services indicating we’re going to go into the schools to start counselling. We have to work sort of interdepartmental with ourselves and the Department of Education. They have to, in turn, work with the school boards in order to appoint counsellors for the schools. We are preparing for that.

We...

Thank you. I don’t know the exact reason. Reasons vary, I do believe, from community to community on why the committees were unable to strike these committees. They vary from not wanting to be involved in the child welfare of other people, and sometimes communities are so small that all child protection and child welfare issues seem to be of a relative child and so on. For some, actually, the fact that the authority staff are not consistently meeting with the community and putting a consistent push into trying to get these child and family services committees struck and operational is largely...

Mr. Speaker, in my role as Minister responsible for Seniors, I would be very pleased to have a discussion with the Minister of Education and the Minister of Justice to see if we can increase the role or add some more responsibility for seniors to go into the schools or into any of the other facilities where there are our people, and see if the elders can assist them and assist the students in the schools, with the culture and whatnot. We’d be pleased to do that. We think that would be important and something that I think has been tried, and I think it’s been proven that it’s a positive thing...

The department has money earmarked into prevention. I could do a presentation, have the department do a presentation to committee in the area that the committee may want to look at moving.

We have met with the NWT Parks and Recreation Association, as an example, and had good discussions, and we support a lot of their initiatives. However, at this point, we have been concentrating on the fact that 40 percent of all our hospitalizations are due to chronic disease, and we’re trying to look at the prevention of the five main diseases that are causing 40 percent of our hospital admissions. So we’re...

Thank you. A lot of our work, our regular health and social services work does address a lot of these recommendations. Like I indicated earlier, there will be some that we can’t do because we will be waiting for revisions.

We will continue to run about a half a million, $500,000 in trying to create child and family services committees. Also, we’re expanding the Healthy Families. Again, another key program that was requested through the recommendations of the review and we’re expanding that. We are trying to, I think this coming year we’re expanding into all communities in the Sahtu. That would...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A lot of the recommendations of the 73 recommendations involve revision to the act itself, the Child and Family Services Act. Our department is acting on some of the recommendations such as the incorporation of the child and family services committees in the communities which are not having much uptake. Also, expanding Healthy Families the quicker the better, it’s directly involved with early childhood development. But the majority of the work that needs to be done would be done after there are amendments to the Child and Family Services Act, and we’re on target to...

Part of our overall objective is to create more of the elder day programs. I and the deputy minister have been to Inuvik to look at the Elder Day Program that’s run out of the Beaufort-Delta hospital. We consider it to be very successful. There have been requests from some of the communities up there, and other communities, as well, to run a day program like that so that people who are preventing the elders from moving into long-term care and taking care of them at home, can go to work, and so on, while their elders are in a safe, secure day program. That’s something that we see as a great...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Any of the budget moves from Health and Social Services or other departments are first vetted through the appropriate committees. We do have a lot of intergovernmental work that goes on right here in this area. Currently, we are trying to work with trying a program that’s run federally, called Aging in Place. That is part of our continuing support for seniors, and that’s just trying to do some health programs and other programs that are needed to keep the people in their homes and prevent them from going into long-term care. Thank you.