Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Unless you want to fly out of Yellowknife on a Saturday morning, the days of departing from Yellowknife in the morning on one of the four major airlines is a thing of the past. Canadian North, WestJet and Air Canada do not offer morning flights to Edmonton and First Air only offers one weekly morning flight and that is on Saturday mornings. No morning flights are offered during weekdays.
Airlines have the right to set their schedules in alignment with their operational and business plans. Unfortunately, I believe that these changed schedules will cost the GNWT money specifically related to medical travel.
Over the years, with the advantage of morning flights, this government has been able to send our residents south in the morning for an afternoon medical appointment and fly them back to the NWT that same evening. This allowed the GNWT to avoid the cost of housing residents overnight for short appointments, such as MRIs and other specialist-type of appointments. Now I believe medical travel will be faced with increased costs as we’ll have to house many of these people overnight where we didn’t used to have to.
I’m wondering what the Department of Health and Social Services is doing to attempt to alleviate some of these potential costs that we face. Specifically, are we changing our medical travel processes and procedures? I know that medical travel is currently being reviewed by the Program Review Office and I’m wondering what kind of findings are coming out of this that are going to help us reduce these ever-increasing costs to medical travel. I’ll be asking the Minister responsible for Health and Social Services some questions on that later.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
