Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the opportunity to ask some questions. I’m going to follow up on some questions mentioned by Member Bisaro. She asked about the downtown day shelter. What I found very odd was the fact that the Minister of Health and Social Services is now saying they’re going to continue the existing vendor to run that facility. With all the concerns and issues that have been raised and the coverage on that particular facility on the quality of the way it has been run, why is he just sort of rolling it over and going to another year contract with the same vendor?
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are not a whole lot of people lining up to run a day shelter, but right now what we’re doing is finding a department or an organization that’s prepared to do that work. We don’t have a final proposal or agreement with them either, but the assumption is that that’s what we’ll do there. There is a possibility, even though we are having some difficulty, that YK Health and Social Services Authority, once they go through an RFP process, and we are questioning whether or not we can get the RFP process completed by the end of this fiscal year. Because we don’t think that we can do a proper process, we thought that we’d extend it a year before we went through that process.
Mr. Speaker, what I’m hearing from the Minister is the department can’t put their paperwork together in order to ask for a proper proposal. We have the Tree of Peace less than two blocks away. We have the Salvation Army just a few blocks north to that particular thing. The Salvation Army has even expressed interest in this particular project if they’d like to take it on. We would rather be satisfied with a substandard or an extensively inadequate product rather than sort of reaching out to what’s good.
Why is it better to continue on with the same people who can’t even force reasonable policies such as no drinking on premises? Why don’t we just shut it down and start fresh properly? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, I think that running a day shelter is a difficult task. Like I indicated, we’re not sure if it’s better to continue with our current vendor. We don’t even know if the current vendor will continue beyond March 31st. All we know is that right now we haven’t received a contribution agreement between ourselves and the YK Health and Social Services Authority so the money can flow to an operator or an organization that can run that facility.
What we do know is that we’ll continue the funding so that we don’t have to close it down. It seemed to have some value. Some Members think that there is value in keeping the day shelter open, so we’ll keep the money flowing. It was intended for a three-year pilot project and we’ve decided not to shut it down after the first three years. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, the day shelter services are so important here in the city and they do help a lot of people. But the reality is, if it’s going to keep being run into the ground by the same bunch of people, we might as well just stop, refresh our mandate and policy, and ask ourselves why do we do this and how do we do it right.
Why doesn’t the Minister just say, let’s take this money that we’re committing into going forward, shut it down and put out a real proposal so we get the services we need that help people who need services such as the day shelter provides, rather than allowing it in its existing form which does more harm than good? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of people using that shelter now. So I’ll have the department look at that. Maybe if the most prudent thing to do is shut the shelter down until we get a proper proposal and operator, or an organization that we think can improve the services to the shelter, then we’ll wait until it gets a little warmer and then we’ll shut it down. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Hawkins.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think the Minister sort of answered my last question in that form.
What would it take to just sort of pause at the end of this fiscal contract to re-write and re-evaluate what we need and what we want as objectives, and to start fresh, maybe in May or June, and do it right, rather than continuing to limp on in a bad form as we are presently existing now?
The whole town knows it, the whole neighbourhood knows it, and certainly the people that are there know that. So what will it take for you to do that? Thank you.
Not much, actually. We could actually let the funding expire on March 31st, shut it down and then start from scratch, look at that building or another building, whatever, and then see if we can provide a better service. We’re prepared to do that.
We are looking, more or less, at the individuals who were using the shelter, the tremendous high use of the shelter, and the weather. Even though we were not receiving some information that we needed to continue, we decided to continue to flow the funding until the fall. But if the Members in the Legislative Assembly think the best thing to do is shut it down and start over, we’re prepared to do that. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The preamble today was a little bit long on everybody’s questions, so I’m going to allow Mr. Nadli to finish off his oral questions for the day. Mr. Nadli.
