Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. I’d like to ask him, has the Department of Health and Social Services ever done a cost-benefit analysis on changing the residency requirement for health care coverage from six month resident per year to five months?
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Since I’ve become the Minister of Health and Social Services, I’ve actually had a number of constituents and other residents raise this particular issue with me, and I’ve already directed the department to begin the analysis. First, what are other jurisdictions doing, how many have moved from the 183 days to 153 days. But more importantly than just the number, how many of those are for out of province and how many of those for out of country. I’ve also asked the department to do a cost analysis on what this could bring or limit the Northwest Territories.
Given that we have a different way of collecting money in the Northwest Territories – TFF compared to how provinces raise their funds – we need to verify that a change of residency won’t affect the TFF. I’ve directed the department to do the work, and once that analysis is done, I’m happy to bring it forward for discussion with Cabinet and committee.
Does the Minister know how long it’s going to take his department to do this homework and come up with a potential proposal to this change of this residency policy?
The staff that we have doing this is the same staff that are doing things like the medical travel review and a number of other things, so it’s a little down the list. They’ve started doing the work, but my direction to them was to complete the review, package it up so that I can explain it, and it can be explained to everybody within this fiscal year.
Could the Minister also please outline for us what exactly would be required for the government to implement a change in residency requirement for health care coverage? Would it require a legislative change or regulatory change? What would be required to make this change?
It would actually take a change to policy, we believe, at this time, but as I indicated, we need to make sure that any changes to policy or residency won’t affect the TFF and ultimately affect the finances that come to the Territories as a whole. From the perspective of Health and Social Services, it’s a policy change, but I’ll be able to confirm if it will affect anything else as we conduct a review and come back to committee and Cabinet.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to ask the Minister if he’s contemplated how he might collect information, how he might survey people who would be in this category of wanting to spend time outside of the territory, whether it be in Canada somewhere else or in another country.
How would he be surveying, I guess, to quantify the number of people that such a policy might affect? He doesn’t need to send a survey to my house because I never go anywhere.
That’s actually incredibly difficult because they don’t have to self-identify that they’re travelling, but under the existing policy they don’t have to notify us anyway, and I don’t believe that would change. We don’t necessarily need to know the numbers. We just need to know that they are residents of the Territories for the allocated period of time. Our colleague Mr. Dolynny mentioned a report card that was recently conducted on snowbirds and travelling south. We have copies of that report and we’re using that information to help us do our research, as well, and we will incorporate the areas that were identified in that for improvement where we scored a C, which is a pass, not a fail, but we certainly can do better in that area. We’re incorporating best practices. We’re incorporating reports. We’re incorporating information and we will come back to committee and Cabinet for further discussion.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
