Caitlin Cleveland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to start by honouring all of the artists who gave me permission to purchase and honour their work in this House. Mr. Speaker, I stand in front of you today wearing the same earrings that I wore my first day in this House. These earrings are vintage beads set one by one in tanned moose hide by local artist Jessie Lafferty. Jessie's work is pristine, with focused and deliberate skill. In every design, stitch, and finished piece, she carries the mastery of her great grandmother who passed her skills to Jessie. Art is beautiful, but it is far more than a thing of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my parting Member's statement is a gift to interpreters. It is going to be both slowly spoken, and it is going to be brief.

To the next Assembly, I wish you a long and uncomfortable priority setting exercise because that will hopefully mean that you land with less priorities than this and previous Assemblies. We often get lost in the weeds thinking that priority setting is an exercise to outline what the government does for every single item we want to see some form of growth on. But it isn't. It is a question of what you want your collective legacy to be.

M...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, can the Minister speak to whether or not the health and social services midwifery recruitment team is looking at fostering relationships with midwifery training institutions to create practicumlike opportunities here in the Northwest Territories? Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, Kam Lake also has a very proud page in the House. We have Liyah YakeleyaGrymalosi who I'd like to say a very huge thank you to. And I also a notice a couple pages around the House who I had the honour of photographing as tiny little babies, including both of the ones to your right and your left. So thank you very much for their service.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I want to thank the Member for Yellowknife Centre for the time that she gave of her own personal time, especially before this Assembly, in sitting down with people and answering a multitude of questions. I was one of those people that had a lot of questions about how being in this building, especially as a parent with young children might look, and I really appreciated having that insight.

I wanted to add though for my colleagues, because it's something that has come up in a lot of conversations, and even at board of management, is how do you make sure that...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, in the early days of this work, when reaching out to the department and asking for dollar figures on this, I was advised right away that the dollar figures would not be substantive as to the entire cost of it because you're also paying for preventative when you're paying for preventative care, you're also preventing things like heart disease, like diabetes, and so the costs like that really can't be easily measured. One of the things that I will say, though, is that one thing you can't put a dollar figure on is people's quality of life and their...

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Yes, I have had numerous conversations. I will say that the Minister was very open to having conversations throughout the life of her tenure as health Minister with both myself and the MLA for Inuvik Twin Lakes. It has been reiterated to both of us that this is an ambitious timeline, especially given the legislative backlog and the legislative agenda of the Department of Health and Social Services. That said, I do believe that this work is very important work. And some of the things that we've seen in other departments within the or sorry, within the Government...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To my right is Ms. Christina Duffy, legislative drafter.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Bill 80, Dental Hygienists Professions Statute Amendment Act amends the Dental Auxiliaries Act and the Health and Social Services Professions Act to require the Minister to recommend to the Commissioner regulations under the Health and Social Services Professions Act; to regulate the practice of dental hygienists; designate the profession of dental hygienists as a profession; transfer the regulation of dental hygienists from Dental Auxiliaries Act to the Health and Social Services Professions Act, and replace genderspecific language with genderneutral language...

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Minister for that as well. I know that this is not, you know, an area where we'd need to reinvent the wheel. The Northwest Territories does this with other health care positions and other jurisdictions do it with midwifery. So I appreciate the Minister's support on that one.

Mr. Speaker, I'm wondering what work is being done to create opportunities and support certification processes in the Northwest Territories for internationallytrained midwives that might be interested in moving to the Northwest Territories? Thank you.