Tom Beaulieu

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...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department plans to continue to work with community leaders and the health authority out of Inuvik, the Beaufort-Delta Health Authority, to try to provide nursing services, physician services into Tsiigehtchic. Ultimately, we would like to somehow place a nurse or two in Tsiigehtchic, but because of the Integrated Service Delivery Model there is not enough work for two full-time nurses. So we’re going to try to work something with the authority and Fort McPherson to try to do something where they can have emergency coverage, which is really, I think, the main issue...

At the department we don’t think we have a shortfall in funding. We think that the action plan is something that would work within our current framework. The goals are to promote and understand awareness and acceptance for mental health. We focus on the person. We talk about improving availability and access to services, so the services that are available, we would try to make them more accessible to improve the efficiency of the services that we have in place. I think that’s going to save money, not cost us money. Some of those goals are what we’re looking at in this action plan.

As a...

I can commit to making beds available for detoxification, two in the North and two in the South.

The department will do everything possible to make sure that people are notified. We will confirm that.

We recognize we’re talking about a volume of about 3,000 people each month whose health care cards will expire. If everyone has not received notification, we will follow up with those individuals and also with anybody who has indicated that there’s a possibility that their information has gotten lost, either going to Inuvik or coming back from Inuvik. We will track that and get to the bottom of any of these issues.

If there is some bit of a backlog because people were not notified through the regular notification system, then the department will do what it can to get that caught up as soon as possible. If we have specific individuals that have not received notification advice either through their MLA or one of the authorities or even Stanton to let people know in the system that they haven’t received their health card, then we will get on that and try to get the health cards to individuals as soon as possible.

Thank you. No, we’re not sure that we will continue beyond ‘13-14. This was initially a three-year pilot project, and at the end of the three-year pilot project, which would end on ‘12-13, there was supposed to be evaluations and a year-end report and proposal for the ongoing years. None of that has been received. So we’re going to fund it for one more year. Hopefully, that will give us an opportunity for Health and Social Services to work with the society that runs the day shelter to be able to get that information together so that we could plan for maybe the longer term. Thank you.

We were just having a couple of little issues here with the contribution agreement year-end report and proposal. So we need to get some of this administrative stuff out of the way and then the department, seeing all those things and everything being in order and finding somebody to run the facility, if the organization is still prepared to do so, then we will fund for the following year. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes.

Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of people using that shelter now. So I’ll have the department look at that. Maybe if the most prudent thing to do is shut the shelter down until we get a proper proposal and operator, or an organization that we think can improve the services to the shelter, then we’ll wait until it gets a little warmer and then we’ll shut it down. Thank you.