Tom Beaulieu

I don’t have the action plan, but I do know that there has been a scan of the legislation. They have reviewed the requirements in order to develop legislation and the requirements, such as having two physicians to declare a death on harvesting organs, developing criteria around brain death, prohibiting the declaring doctors to be involved in the transplant, prohibit buying, selling or dealing with human tissue, and the whole issue of confidentiality also. Those are the things that I think the department has reviewed in order to move forward on the development of some sort of an act, and I...

No statistics, like, very recently, within the last two or three years. However, up until 2010 and going back about 15 years, there has been 22 different patients that had received kidney transplants in a five-year period up until about 2000. We need more information. We are going to update the information that I have with me. It was approximately 25 people that received other organ donations and other tissue donations.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today it gives me great pleasure to acknowledge and share with you the history of the Lutselk’e Community Garden.

Years ago, elder Alizette Lockhart of Lutselk’e had a vision of a community garden. She often spoke of her vision and succeeded only as far as planting a seed in people’s minds. Although she did foresee a community garden, there was not enough community support back then to make her vision a reality. However, over the years, Alizette and other community members finally decided to visit the idea of planting a garden, the seed that Alizette planted.

In 2007...

I think the management’s responsibility is to provide a place for individuals to attend. I think they indicate that if there are other issues, other behaviours of the clientele that they’re looking for some training to deal with it, but I suppose that if you want to indicate that the responsibility of a warm, safe place for individuals to attend the day shelter, then I guess that would be the responsibility of the people operating the shelter.

Nobody’s really to blame. I’m just saying that this service is needed, and in the facility and how well it runs is largely dependent upon on who’s using the service. Thank you.

We do want to go to an RFP. The issue was that the request as we were dealing with the Health and Social Services Authority, the request for them to recommend that we go through an RFP process. So they would perhaps look at other providers. It was very late in the fiscal year and we didn’t think we could achieve the proper requests for proposals at that late juncture. So we decided to continue with the cash flow, and then during the process, as we’re continuing to operate, then go for an RFP. So in future years if it’s deemed that the facility should remain open, then it will be done under the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The provider of the day shelter, I think the initial intent was exactly what they think indicates as a shelter, a place for some people to get out of the weather and go and have a warm place to go to. Within that, as they were operating the shelter, they made themselves, the John Howard Society themselves made recommendations to provide some training to staff. They thought that the operation of the shelter would require some training of their own staff on various things like First Aid and so on. Also, trying to provide some referrals. So individuals that are using the...

I don’t have the statistics on the Hope Foundation, but I will ask the department, through the deputy minister, to try to get that information to determine how many donations were made from people that live in the NWT to the Hope Foundation.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The hospitals in the NWT are currently unable to receive harvested organs and tissue donation; however, they are working with the Hope Foundation, which is a human organ procurement exchange out of Edmonton. They work with them to try to harvest or do organ donation, if the possibility exists and the opportunity exists.

Mr. Speaker, I think that running a day shelter is a difficult task. Like I indicated, we’re not sure if it’s better to continue with our current vendor. We don’t even know if the current vendor will continue beyond March 31st. All we know is that right now we haven’t received a contribution agreement between ourselves and the YK Health and Social Services Authority so the money can flow to an operator or an organization that can run that facility.

What we do know is that we’ll continue the funding so that we don’t have to close it down. It seemed to have some value. Some Members think that...