Kate Reid

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to the Minister for that. And thank you to her department for sending us some more information about EHB today. I really appreciate it. In the and it was a publicly accessible letter. Thank you for that.

So in that letter, it's noted that currently about 1,400 people are in the EHB program under the specified disease conditions list. The department estimates that that will grow when the specified disease condition list is dropped and the new policy rolls out in September, and the cost differential that health is estimating will be about $1.2 million. So it's...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That's really great to hear. I am hoping the Minister may be able to commit to bring the findings of the client navigators back to us come budget time next year possibly? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you, my colleagues, for speaking a bit about basic income today.

Mr. Speaker, can the Minister of ECE explain if her department has ever considered tailoring the income assistance system in the context of a regionallybased or a communitybased way rather than with a onesizefitsall approach. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today I am joining in with my colleagues to speak about income assistance services in the NWT. Mr. Speaker, since becoming an MLA, my understanding of social programs and services, like income assistance, has continued to evolve. I have learned through discussions with my colleagues that what I think may be appropriate for Yellowknife residents may not be appropriate or perhaps applicable to other communities or regions. For example, what I think might be a good idea and could really work for folks living in Yellowknife might not work the same way or at all...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Nothing further.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to the Minister. And I do appreciate, you know, that she wants to do right by the people and maintain monitoring on that. But I'm going to ask a really brief question, but it might be a hard question to answer.

Does the department anticipate now, with the bill in the Canadian Parliament going through on pharmacare, have we started to look at any anticipatory measures around how that might impact this program and some of our pharmacy medication based programs? Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I want to preface this question with the fact that I've had really good conversations with the Minister on this, and I think where she and I differ on the perspective of this issue is the how, not the why. The why being, of course, that we want to have midwifery services in our smaller communities, especially for our Indigenous folks who are giving birth. So my question, however, is, you know, given that the GNWT has made repeated public commitments to the expansion of midwifery in the NWT, how did it arrive at the decision to discontinue the establishment of midwifery...

So administrative and support services? Some questions, so thank you.

Could the Minister speak to -- I'm noticing here on the lines for both operations expenditures summary and I believe -- maybe I'm mistaken. But anyway, at least in the operations and expenditures summary that the -- yes, so for the line items for administration and information services, the costs have continually gone up from actuals to revised estimates from 2022-2023 and in both cases, in these main estimates, have been brought down again. Can the Minister speak to whether or not she anticipates those costs might go up...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And, again, simply just a strong comment strongly encouraging the Minister to prioritize the timeline of the review to the Act and any possible amendments considering that public safety is a priority of this Assembly, and we hear -- or at least I hear in my constituency, concerns around public safety in rental units. So more of a comment than a question. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So, you know, I kind of took that as an interest on my own accord to go back and look at the annual reports because that was mentioned, I think, in the business plan explicitly. So if you go back to at least the '18, '19 annual report and every one since, the chief rental officer notes that tenants make many inquiries under section 30 of the Act but do not follow through due to likely onerous processes to complete the work of an application. So I would think that additional support for tenants could help alleviate these issues. And so I'd like to ask the Minister if there...