Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Recently, Health and Social Services closed the Joe Greenland building down and then retained over $400,000 of the funding that’s used to operate the facility there in home care. The intention now is to hire two more additional home care workers for Aklavik and we are now also looking at Fort McPherson, 132 people over the age of 60 in Fort McPherson and some of which need home care and there’s only one home care worker in Fort McPherson. So the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority is looking at that situation right now to determine the need, the exact...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As indicated, the Member is referring to addictions. The intention is to move to prevention. That is different. We are tripling the amount of money that is focused in on prevention of addictions. That is different.

As the Member said, there’s a requirement for increase in home care, but it’s just one area where there could be a decrease if the elders were allowed to have family members. We agree, also, that family members staying with elders do prevent elders from going into long-term facilities, which are very expensive. The alternative I think that this government needs to look at and will be looking at, is to make sure that program policies that prevent elders from getting assistance in their homes because of the risk of losing programs that they should be getting, and subsidies that they should be...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Recently, I met with the NWT Seniors’ Society. We had a similar discussion. The seniors wished to be more involved with not just their own communities but to be involved with the whole territory. Representatives were there from all the communities. I indicated to them that this government was prepared to work. We are doing some intergovernmental work with the seniors and we are planning on trying to utilize the seniors and get their input as to what services they need at the community level.

Right now the department has some programs in place to address some of the problems. We are enhancing the Aftercare Program for addictions, and the closure of the addictions and detox centre, the closure of some of the treatment centres was something that happened in the past due to capacity, not the capacity of the department but the capacity of the treatment centres. All of the treatment centres at that time were operating with very few clients. The decision was made to roll it up into one centre and try to keep that centre full and operating as efficiently as possible.

At this time, even...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is where I had indicated earlier of working upstream. We’re trying to work in the intervention, to try to ensure that addictions that people are facing, and mental health issues that people are facing, that they do not face those issues by us trying to prevent that from happening. Our intention, again, is to look at increasing our budgets in the area of prevention, hopefully working with children and so on at a young age and also dealing with youth. We think that that type of approach of making the youth and the children aware of the issues and so on, and then as...

I don’t have the date right now but I can get back to the Minister with the date.

Yes, the department is dealing or consulting with the Yellowknife Association for Community Living as it expands the current program, which, again, was in Yellowknife and the intention of expanding outside. There is consultation between the department and YACL to expand the program outside of just Yellowknife.

I’m sorry, Mr. Speaker, I didn’t hear the question.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. [English translation not provided.]

Mr. Speaker, today I would like to pay tribute to a well-respected elder, Pierre Catholique from Lutselk’e, who passed away last week. Elder Pierre Catholique was born May 1, 1927, and passed away on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, at age 84.

Pierre was born and raised around the Artillery Lake area at Gahcho Kue and that’s also in the Reliance area, known as Nats’ejee K’eh. He lived a very traditional lifestyle by hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering on the land. As a young man Pierre worked with the RCMP in Fort Reliance and worked...