Tom Beaulieu

Yes, that work will be completed.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Grieving families of individuals who have passed away from cancer can get client counselling from the community counsellors. Also the access through how they can obtain community counsel to deal with the grieving of loved ones through cancer can be arranged through the community health nurse. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. For the prior year’s expenses, I believe is what the Member is referring to, I can get the assistant deputy minister to respond to that.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. NWT health insurance pays and approves the cost of cancer therapies provided to the clients, and the department works closely in partnership with Alberta Health Services, in particular the Cross Cancer Institute, to provide the services to residents of the NWT at this time. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, I do.

Mr. Speaker, yes, the Department of Health and Social Services is prepared to look at research with health and social services from the Sahtu. I have no problem doing that. Thank you.

The Department of Health and Social Services supports different alternatives to getting people to on-the-land activities. We have made $50,000 a year available to all of the communities if they want to do some on-the-land activities. It’s been a request from the communities and I’ve asked the Department of Health and Social Services to look at the possibility of developing on-the-land treatment programs across the North. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The GNWT has not looked at the current inventory for the possibility of using our inventory for treatment facilities. However, I think I should clarify that the intention, I think, is that we would look at what we have in place now for health and social services for treatment as opposed to building new infrastructure. So the idea of looking at current infrastructure was more or less looking at what infrastructure we had on the ground now as opposed to building something new. Thank you.

The entire department is trying to get more into prevention and when we put out reports and it’s necessary to indicate that the cause of this cancer is this or the human behaviour here is causing this type of cancer, then that can be something that we are working on. Whether or not the causes of each of the types of cancer are going to be specifically indicated in the cancer report that we’re going to be bringing out in 2012, I haven’t seen the report so I don’t know if that information will be there. But, yes, we are trying to get the message out. That’s the idea, is to get the message out to...

In Fort Good Hope between 2001 and 2009 there’s been 19 cases of diagnosis with cancer and there are 980 cases of cancer diagnosis across the NWT.

I’m not saying we don’t want to do this in Fort Good Hope; all I’m saying is it would be good for the department and it would be feasible for the department to develop a strategy that addresses the issue right across the Territories and not specific to one community.