Tom Beaulieu

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.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m going to have Deputy Minister DeLancey respond to that.

At this time our intention was to have the chief medical officer go to Fort Good Hope to meet with the people there. I know I have talked to the chairman of the Sahtu Health and Social Services Board and she’s interested in myself, along with some departmental staff and the MLA to go to the Sahtu and travel to all the communities, including Fort Good Hope, and maybe from that type of discussion could evolve into something that is more focused on this particular issue.

Thank you, Madam Chair. That work is being done with the people at Stanton and it’s part of the planning study that’s in progress at this time.

The department will be publishing the report which covers 2001-2009, actually. The report is scheduled to be released in 2012, the earlier part of 2012 is my hope, and the information will cover such things as cancer incidents, mortality, cancer screening and also the stages of cancer diagnosis.