Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about the alarming statistics in our daily intake of sugar and some of the national guidelines that will be forthcoming from our National Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. Last week I wanted to take this journey a bit further and I posed some specifics around obesity in our territory. This week I’d like to ask some questions to the Minister of Health and Social Services on the subject.
As I said, a couple of weeks ago I asked a question to the Minister of what he was doing specifically in dealing with our daily consumption of sugar in the Northwest Territories. His response, and I quote from Hansard: “I’m not sure. I can’t really speak to the specifics of whether we have programs aimed just purely at sugar, but I will get the information for the Member.”
Can the Minister give the House any update on what he discovered? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The honourable Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have directed the department to pull that information together. It hasn’t been pulled together at this point, but we will get it to the Member at our earliest convenience. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Can the Minister inform the House of any specific programs that are integrated with our daycares, our soon-to-be junior kindergartens and our schools that deal with sugar and calorie education? If not, why?
In cooperation with Education, Culture and Employment and MACA, we are obviously encouraging healthy living, healthy eating, healthy activity within our schools and within our youth populations. We do have the Drop the Pop campaign, which is specifically aimed at pop, but by default, we are trying to address some sugar issues there as well.
In this budget, we also have a significant amount of money – $1 million – put into healthy eating for school programs as part of our Early Childhood Development and Anti-Poverty strategies. So there are a number of things we’re trying to do. I personally believe we need to do more and we will be working with the department to put in more strategies to encourage healthy eating, including a greater awareness on sugar and the differences between more raw based sugars that are in food which has a higher glycemic index.
It sounds like the Minister is becoming more aware of sugar and I applaud his knowledge on it.
Can the Minister inform the House if his department collects statistics on obesity in the Northwest Territories and, more specifically, the economic and regional variances? If so, is this information publicly available? Thank you.
We don’t have that type of data, but we will be looking at improving our record keeping and be able to have more solid record keeping and be able to provide more timely statistics to all Members of the House, including Cabinet, once we have passed the Health Information Act and it moves forward via…(inaudible)…we will have the ability to track data on a more real time basis. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think we are making headway here today. Can the Minister inform the House what his policy on dealing with obesity is in the Northwest Territories? Does he have a strategy he can share with us? Thank you.
As I’ve already indicated, we are trying to deal with it on a more holistic level. We are working on promoting healthy living, healthy activity and healthy eating. We are doing that in cooperation with Education, Culture and Employment and MACA. Obviously, we would like to do a little bit more. I think it’s important to educate the people on the differences of natural sugar occurring in food and white sugar, which is more of the problem than the sugar naturally occurring in food.
We need to do a better job. We are going to put something together so that we can help people understand the difference and help them have informed decisions. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
