Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement I talked about traditional healing practices that should be supported by the GNWT. I was generally referring to our own GNWT staff. I have questions for the Minister of Human Resources on the matter.
Can the Minister advise me if he has had any discussions at all in his department on traditional healing practices as an alternative to healing for our staff? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Bob McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have had some discussions on it, mainly because of the fact that we have had some requests from Aboriginal employees that have been to visit and seek traditional healing from different places in Canada.
This is something that is starting to be recognized in formal medical circles. We are trying to make sure that we can deal properly with employees that want to seek traditional healing. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Can the Minister tell me if there is a plan to add traditional healing to recoverable expenses for GNWT employees when seeking alternative medicines for healing? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
We don’t have a plan, per se. As the Member may know, within the Government of the Northwest Territories most of our expenses are either covered through our insurance policies or through the government programs. I guess the difficulty we’ve been having is to identify -- how would I say it -- in a formal medical sense we have to deal with certifications and we need approved medical criteria that we deal with. We don’t necessarily have that with traditional healing. Generally we deal with it on an ad hoc individual basis, but we are doing some work to promote cultural awareness and diversity within the government. I think that would be an area where we can start to look at it.
Can the Minister briefly explain a little more on what some of the barriers or some of the obstacles would be for us to move into supporting the traditional healing as an alternative? Thank you.
I can think of a number of barriers. I think it’s very similar to when the government developed the Traditional Knowledge Policy. In a lot of cases at the community level, people, when there were no other medical services, used traditional healing or traditional knowledge with regard to traditional medicines and how they dealt with different kinds of illnesses or accidents. So there is the formal. It’s the same when you look at scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge. It’s a question of how do you recognize it. So we would have to work with our Department of Health because traditional healing generally falls within the health care system.
As a government, for those employees that have been accessing traditional healers, we’ve been using our Employee Assistance Program to try and deal with it. I think in the longer term we would have to look at different areas and try to identify people that are traditional healers or that provide traditional holistic medicine, I guess.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final supplementary, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Will the Minister then work with the Department of Health to sort of look at what we would refer to as best practices maybe across the country, maybe across the territory, and look at the whole issue around traditional healing and allow traditional healers to be a part of the system when people are seeking an alternative healing method?
As I indicated, we are looking at how to increase cultural awareness and diversity. I think that would be a start. We’ll get our consultant to help us in identifying those areas and make sure that those employees that practice it are not dismissed out of hand and we can try to work together to find ways to deal with it.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
