Mr. Speaker, social issues of this type and nature are the responsibility of the Government of the Northwest Territories, the responsibility of the Department of Health and Social Services. I’m not sure where she finds this in the mandate of the City of Yellowknife. I think what we are finding here is a situation where the City of Yellowknife is desperate because the Department of Health and Social Services has been ignoring these issues for so long. They have no other choice but to take on other issues that are outside their mandate.

So I ask again: would the Minister show some initiative by...

Mr. Speaker, the issue I raised today in my Member’s statement has a serious impact on the people who live and work in downtown Yellowknife. It causes many people great concern. The fact of the lack of public washrooms causes people to do natural things in unnatural places, if I may say. You know, that is not supporting dignity and humanity in the nicest of ways.

I know it’s far too easy to make jokes about this, and it is probably not uncommon to want to make jokes about something like this, but this is a serious issue. The people in the downtown riding want to move out of downtown. People don...

I just want to again say that too much information in the competitive process, by us giving it away, is like telling everybody what to bid. I just want to say it’s an issue near and dear to my heart, to show that we’re working as hard as we can to get the best prices for products. I cannot emphasize enough to the folks from Finance, obviously, from Public Works and everybody else who put this package together that it’s a good product, and I think it will serve us all very well going forward. I’m extremely thankful that the Minister, as well as many other government staff, heard the calls of...

Mr. Speaker, the Minister might be correct if I lived in Toronto, because the City of Toronto is mandated with health issues; maybe in Calgary, maybe in Edmonton if we lived in that little imaginary answer, but not in the city of Yellowknife. The City of Yellowknife is not mandated to take care of health and social services issues.

If the minister is willing to look into this and if she is willing to talk to the mayor — I can’t make a commitment on behalf of the mayor — is she willing to also look for appropriate funding if she finds that the city wants to take this issue on? Because this is a...

Mr. Speaker, that answer wasn’t quite what I was looking for, because I don’t believe it is a Municipal Affairs issue. Municipal issues are worries about property taxes, dogs and dumps. It wasn’t really designed to worry about the social issues around homelessness. The problem out of this situation is they’ve been picking up where the government has been failing miserably.

So I ask once again in maybe a slightly different way: would the Minister take leadership on this issue, show some initiative, get out there and say, “Look, maybe let’s see what we can do and contact some of our service...

What work has been done to examine the relationship of aboriginal governments and their regions so that when we take self-government models and overlap them with these regional boards’ jurisdictions…? What work is being done to examine that type of relationship and the problems that this will cause if we proceed with a regional based board model?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions will be to the Minister who’s responsible for the Strategic Initiative Committee on Refocusing Government, and that will be Minister Michael Miltenberger.

Mr. Speaker, referring back to my Member’s statement, of course, I’d like to know what this Minister has done to examine the costs of rolling up most of these boards into a regional services model. If he has an idea of what that costs, will he make it public?

The die has been cast, Mr. Speaker, and this government seems to have set in motion the decision to implement the regional services board model as a quintessential advantage of board reform. I agree there are too many boards out there, and we should examine their mandates and strive for efficiencies where we can find them, especially during times of fiscal crisis and restraint.

What’s odd about the situation is that it’s no different from the repeated request made by me and many other Members for program review before slicing and dicing. What is interesting here, as usual, is that any decision...

Thank you. Just for clarification, the Minister said she doesn’t have the ability to override the committee. I’m not suggesting by any means that we override the committee on one specific case. That turns into a slippery slope regardless of the issue.

What authority does the Minister have to put this drug on the extended health benefits list? If it shows promise, why aren’t we investigating this to make sure we have access to it? Thank you.

It is really nice that there’s a committee in place, but that doesn’t do much for the family that has a family member who is suffering from MS. This drug is a well known drug that demonstrates progress and promise when you have this disease. As I’m sure most people know, this is quite a debilitating disease. There is only one direction it goes. When we have a drug that shows promise, I think we should be latching on to it.

I guess my real question really comes down to how we get access to this. I have a letter here from the Minister. My original question was: is this covered? The Minister’s...