Shauna Morgan

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And that's a great segue as my questions are also for the Minister of ECE around remediation workforce.

So my first question is what are ECE's objectives from having a staff person sit on the Giant Mine socioeconomic working group? In other words, are we achieving what we're hoping to achieve by participating in that working group? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess what I'm getting at is did we not budget for any agency nurses in the 20232024 budget? And if so, was there an assumption that we would not need any? Leading to the question, how could we have been so far off in our assumption or prediction that we expected we would need none, and we ended up needing $5.5 million worth. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I appreciate that information the Minister was able to give, and I look forward to more indepth discussion at our committee meeting. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Final line of questioning here. Are these agreements public, or could they be made public so that we can all better understand, you know, what has been the amount of federal funding for each of these pockets over the years, what's being carried forward, what you know, what aspects are ending, what are the new agreements? Are any of the details around these agreements public or can they be public? Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just to wrap up on that one, I just want to emphasize how important I think it is to plan ahead and ensure we have proper funding to do these projects when they need to be done and not wait until something is in an emergency state before we, you know, try to fix it and we're always behind the 8 ball and usually things cost more at that point and have become more dire. So I'm hopeful in the case of this project that we will get ahead of it and plan ahead and do what needs to be done to ensure the harbour is restored. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. So moving on to the agreements with the federal government, various agreements around health funding. Can the Minister clarify whether any of these agreements have resulted in carryover from previous years' funding being unspent?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks for that. So I'll leave that for now. I think these are good areas to follow up in to follow up on both to make sure that we have appropriate contracts with the facilities in the south, that we're getting good value for money, that, you know, there's appropriate oversight, and that people are getting the services they need, and to look more into these patterns of do we have more people signing up for than before and why. Anyway, I found this useful for now and will definitely follow up. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So, first, about the collective agreement with the Hay River Health and Social Services Authority, can the Minister confirm whether all additional salary and benefits that were negotiated as part of this agreement, the new agreement, have been costed out or whether there are elements in these agreements that are yet to be costed?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Are these RFPs issued every single year, or how often?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I just wanted us to sort of have that in our minds and have that in perspective. But I'll just go on briefly to the second item in there about the medical travel benefits.

I thank the Member for Range Lake for asking many of these questions but I just wanted to follow up with one question about what are we what steps are we taking to actually reestablish dental services in the regions so that hopefully some of these medical travel costs could go down going forward?