Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is to the Premier of the Northwest Territories. The Northwest Territories is very unique and our communities are very unique, so unique that the school in Colville Lake is so different than a school in any larger centres or regional centres. That’s uniqueness. Yet, we try to have policies that cover everybody on a fair basis.
I want to ask the Premier here, in the Northwest Territories, with the uniqueness, is it so that our programs, our structures, our infrastructure priorities, certainly, they are different. Are there policies in the government that show that we should be all equal in terms of where the funding goes in terms of the infrastructure based on the needs for that community?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a government we live in a very large territory and there are a lot of regional, geographical and environmental differences. We try to maintain standards so that we have some consistent delivery of programs, but we recognize that not every region is going to be exactly the same. We try to maintain certain standards and we try to deliver the same level of programs and services, but it’s not always achievable.
Thank you, Mr. Premier, for your responses. I certainly want to say to you and Minister Glen Abernethy, coming down to the Sahtu and enjoying the uniqueness of the moose skin boat in the region. That’s what I wanted to get to the uniqueness of the region and maintaining certain standards, and that’s a fair response from the Premier here, that the communities in the Sahtu know we want to look at some of our standards in the smaller communities.
So, from saying that, I want to ask the Premier, are there different classes of infrastructure or classes of community. Colville Lake, Trout Lake, Ulukhaktok and, say, Tsiigehtchic, because they’re small and there’s a certain number that are deemed as a certain class within the government operations, so this is where they get different types of funding for their health centres or their education schooling.
With the myriad of programs and services that we deliver, generally we take into account a number of different features. For example, population is a very important component of any program delivery. For example, Education, they tried to tie their funding to the number of students, parent/student ratios. The Department of Health has a compendium of care, and depending on the population, if we have very small communities we can’t always have a nurse in every community. Some programs are tied to each other. Generally we don’t send nurses where there are no RCMP officers. Those kinds of things.
We also, through the land claims, the negotiations, self-government negotiations, we’ve developed a directory of services and we’re trying to maintain a standard so that people can be mobile and can expect a certain level of care and access to programs.
Fair enough. Thank you, Premier, for the explanation of the different level of communities in the Northwest Territories. That’s probably one of our biggest challenges as legislators when we put together infrastructure or O and M budgets as to how do we maintain a certain level of standard to ensure that the communities are receiving just about the same levels or standards of care in different communities and larger centres. That’s where probably our biggest concern is.
I want to ask the Premier on that. Is there a point in the communities like Colville Lake where you know that a nurse comes in there once a month but they won’t stay very long because of the time factor, is there is a level of health care standards, education standards or any other type of services that could be stated, well, that’s similar to Inuvik, Hay River or Yellowknife or Fort Smith, saying that they’re receiving the same type of care even though it doesn’t seem that’s the way the people see it in these small communities?
For example, in education we have the same level of curriculum for all of the communities. Again, it’s affected by population and the number of students. With health, we have a similar level of care. The health boards provide for health professionals to travel to communities on a regular basis in how they deal with health care. There are also certain standards in terms of placement of nurses and other health professionals.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Premier is correct that we do have the same health curriculum in the Northwest Territories, and I certainly agree with him. However, the disagreement for me is it’s not taught in the same type of environment in teaching that health curriculum. Colville Lake has one room partitioned off by a paper-thin wall that has four different classes, five different classes in one building here. As to other schools, we don’t have that type of scenario here. That’s where I am getting at, that hopefully with the responsibility of new powers from Ottawa, we could make some of these changes to our smaller communities where they would feel that they are getting the same quality of learning environment in these small communities and that we would become a true partner in the Northwest Territories in its evolution of becoming, hopefully one day, a province.
I think we all aspire to that. We are obviously limited by the level of resources. We try to do the best we can for every community. I should point out that in our capital needs assessment, Colville Lake has been identified in there, that there will be some planning studies that will be done to make sure that the needs of Colville Lake are eventually addressed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
