Thank you. Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. It gets back, again, to what I talked about yesterday and what I had mentioned earlier in my Member’s statement. That’s the fact that FMBS has been paying the payroll at Stanton Territorial Hospital for the past six months, and they’re into FMBS now to the tune of over $20 million.
I’d like to ask the Minister — and the alarm bells should be going off for somebody somewhere if this is the case, and it looks like it is: does the Minister know what the hospital is doing with the $4 million to $4.5 million per month that normally would be spent on or allocated to salaries?
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. The honourable Minister of Health, Ms. Lee.
Mr. Speaker, I want to state, first of all, that the payroll for all of the health authorities — not just Stanton but all government departments and everyone — are first paid by FMBS. That’s a regular procedure, so this is not new. Then the authorities have to pay back those amounts. Because of the cash-flow issues with Stanton Territorial Health Authority, they have not been able to pay that back.
As we know, the authority has been experiencing a deficit situation for about five years now and in the last three years more significantly than the previous two. Because they started with a deficit situation, they are falling behind in paying for their payroll. It’s strictly a cash-flow issue. As the Member stated, no employees should be concerned about their pay not being paid and such. It’s really a strictly cash-flow issue.
Mr. Speaker, we’re talking a little bit about semantics, whether FMBS pays first or Stanton pays. The bottom line is they’re not paying their bills. I’d like to ask the Minister again: if they’re not paying the $4.5 million to FMBS to address the salaries question, what are they spending that $4.5 million on?
Mr. Speaker, we should remember that we do recognize — and I agree with the Member — that we do have a serious situation with the deficit situation, and we have to work to resolve those.
The authority has a budget of about $88 million. Each payroll is about $2 million. Money comes in; money comes out. They have receivables in their budget, and they are having to pay for lots of things. It’s a cash-flow issue.
The accumulated-deficit issue is something I’m working on with the public administrator and the management of the authority.
Mr. Speaker, the problems at that hospital have been around for a number of years, going back eight years now. I don’t know how waving a magic wand and getting a public administrator in there for three months is going to address the problems.
There are some serious issues with management and the operation of that hospital that need to be addressed, and they haven’t been addressed to date. I’d like to ask the Minister: what are the plans to address the management at that hospital? That, to me, is where the problems lie.
Mr. Speaker, I’m not sure there is one black-and-white, short answer to that issue, and I would have to disagree with the Member that there have been major problems there for eight years.
We do agree there is an accumulated-deficit situation. The government has tried to figure out exactly where the issues are. That was the reason the zero base review was initiated last fall. When I came on board, that process was in the works. We have a preliminary report that came out in April that tells us the Stanton authority does not have the money to deliver the 53 programs as funded and running now.
For me as a Minister, instead of subjecting the authority to another extensive review of some kind, I thought it would be helpful to install a public administrator who is familiar with the operation of the hospital, who doesn’t have to study the institution for a long time. He will go in and look at the information we have now and see what structural recommendations he could make to me as a Minister so that I could make some changes as necessary and as recommended, with participation from the Standing Committee on Social Programs.
Final supplementary, Mr. Ramsay.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To my knowledge, there was a public administrator there over the past number of years. I’d like to ask the question: what were the former public administrators doing, and what was the CEO doing? Why do we have to get another public administrator in there again to tell us what’s going on when we know what the problems are? It’s in management, and we have to take care of that. Can I ask the Minister that?
It is true the Stanton territorial authority has been under the oversight of public administrators, because there has not been a board since 2003. The law requires that, and we have had a series of public administrators.
What’s new about the new administrator is that he was given a very specific mandate, a very broad mandate, to go in and take advantage of his experience and knowledge of the operation as well as some of the studies we have done, such as the zero-base review, and to make recommendations to me about precise actions that need to be taken.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
