Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, want to join my colleagues here on asking for nurses in our small communities. I think of this as a P3 project and in the departmental mission we are to promote, protect and provide healthy well-being to the people of the Northwest Territories, and certainly our small communities fit under that criteria as people of the Northwest Territories.
How long have our small communities done without any type of full-time nurses on a full-time basis? How many communities right now can truly say we do not have a full-time nurse in our community? We do have fly-ins, if the weather is good. We do have that, but we do not have full-time nurses in our communities and our communities are getting fed up, the haves and have nots. How can we sit here and still allow a community like Tsiigehtchic or Wrigley or Colville Lake not to have nurses while we enjoy them ourselves in our own communities? We take it for granted. We hire local people to dispense medicine, to fix up sores, cuts or bruises, but we don’t have the security or the certainty of a nurse there. Those days are gone. The little house on the prairie is gone. We’ve got to have full-time nurses now, and I am looking for it from this government here, hoping that this government would set down a plan and say in the next 10 years this is what we are going to do, not reasons why we can’t do it. Reasons why we could do it and we should do it and it must get done. Not yet, in my 10 years that I have been standing here and talking, has the government shown me a plan as thick as this that will tell us we’re going to be putting nurses in your communities each year. That’s what the people want.
I’m going to ask the Minister of Health some questions on why Colville Lake does not yet have a full-time nurse like all the communities in the North.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
