Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I’d like to talk about one of the Northwest Territories most valuable assets. I’d like to talk about seniors. I’ll have questions for the Minister responsible for Seniors. That’s correct. We have a Minister responsible for Seniors. We have so many issues in this area that we need a Minister responsible for it.
This is an expanding part of our population. The cost of living affects this group greatly. We need to work on how we can reduce the cost of living for seniors. We know that there is elder abuse out there. We know that there is a lot of need for the seniors and medical support systems, medical travel, dental care and, obviously, in Hay River we know about the seniors health facilities that we’re looking at building this year. We know the expansion of this population requires that we’ve got to look at the needs for more facilities.
Seniors need assistance with housing and how they get on to those housing lists. The seniors who are staying in their homes, we need to support them more. We need to look at the fuel subsidy that we have for seniors and we need to look at increasing that. We haven’t looked at that for a long time.
I know the government works closely with NWT seniors, but we need to look at the funding of NWT seniors and funding regional seniors’ groups to help them support seniors throughout the Territories. We need to work harder to improve seniors’ quality of life in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
