Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services and getting back to my Member’s statement where I talked about the Northwest Territories Health Status Report that was tabled in this House on August 22nd. Some very concerning details included in that report. I spoke of those in my Member’s statement: the overall health of the territory dropping 11 percent in four years; the rate of diabetes continuing to climb; obesity 10 percent above the national average; activity rates falling from 54 percent in 2003 to 41 percent in 2009; the prevalence of STIs in our territory is shocking and alarming. I want to begin by asking the Minister of Health and Social Services what will become of this report. What are we going to do with this report and the information contained in it?
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is an important planning document. It comes out in five-year increments. It’s one of the core pieces of information that we use as a department and Legislature to look at where do we focus our attention, what’s working, what’s not working, what are some of the alarming trends, as the Member pointed out. We get back to the inevitable return to the issue of prevention and the abuse of alcohol, smoking, improper diet, lack of exercise; fundamental things that we have not yet instilled into the people of the Northwest Territories; personal choice issues that have not yet been picked up by the people. It is a very important document.
In the eight years I’ve been a Member of this House I’ve seen campaigns come and go. We’ve had Get Active campaigns. We had the former Minister of Health and Social Services just a few years back handing out posters and condoms and changing from a sexual transmitted disease to an STI, sexually transmitted infection, and drawing attention to that. The numbers aren’t getting any better.
I’d again like to ask the Minister if we are going to use the data that’s contained in this report to re-evaluate the campaigns and the programs that we’re spending money on every year that really, when you look at the numbers, aren’t making much of a difference.
The over $300 million that we do spend provides a very high level of service to the people. The Member’s point is a good one. We’ll never have enough hospitals, enough facilities to put people back together, to get them healthy once they’re sick, and the challenge is an unmet challenge, is the one that the Member lays out.
Will this be used? We’re going into an election here in a couple weeks. There will be in the next few months an Assembly elected and a Cabinet picked. Through the business planning process and the priorities of the next Assembly, they will be targeting where they think the resources of government should be spent, and what improvements should be made, and what changes should be made.
I thank the Minister for that reply. I’d like to follow up by asking the Minister, who takes ultimate responsibility in evaluating the programs and services that we provide in these various areas, if we can enact some changes so that the money that we’re spending is actually going to make a difference.
Ultimately the broad issues, the broad decisions, the review, the voting of the public money comes to the floor of this House. There are MLAs elected, there are committees put together, there’s a government selected, business plans are done based on the initial fundamental direction that comes out of the Legislative Assembly.
As we’ve attempted to do in the 16th Assembly in terms of program reviews, the government, working with the committees and MLAs, has the fundamental task of ensuring that the money is spent, and that the program priorities are the right ones, and that there is value for money. That is where the fundamental responsibility lies.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final supplementary, Mr. Ramsay.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Once again I thank the Minister for the response. In closing, last question, I guess with technology and systems being what they are today, and I’m very appreciative of the report that was tabled on the 22nd of August, but we’re dealing with two- and three-year-old data in most cases. I’m just wondering if that’s the best we can hope for going forward. We should be trying to get some more up-to-date information when dealing with these things.
This is a longitudinal look at trends across the land in different areas. If you take this five-year increment and put the other three reports before them, you’d see, as the Member has indicated and as the report demonstrates clearly, a lot of our statistics continue to go in the wrong direction. We have some more current statistics on different areas that we could look at if the Member has a specific request, but in terms of gathering this kind of broad data that’s going to give us those trends and available for planning purposes, it’s those five-year increments that give us that kind of necessary information.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.
