Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to talk about the Hay River Hospital. When the addition was put on the old hospital and the new hospital, it was state-of-the-art, cutting-edge technology with all of the supplies at the door of the rooms. It was an amazing day. I was there in the audience at the ribbon cutting for that new hospital.
That hospital has many happy memories – I had three children in there – and some sad memories. I said goodbye to some dear friends that were there, some elderly folks, and I even had a chance to work there and my husband worked there.
For a government that says they are billions of dollars in infrastructure deficit, we cannot discard a piece of infrastructure that is still viable. It can’t be useful one day and ready for the wrecking ball the next.
Maybe we needed a new hospital. Well, we did need a new hospital, and thank you for that, but that doesn’t mean that the old hospital is garbage. If it can’t be used as a hospital, surely it can be used as something else with all of the things that we need in the Northwest Territories.
Let’s list off a few of the things that we send our residents south for: drug detox, alcohol treatment, diabetes treatment and education for families. And we have a growing number of seniors in the Northwest Territories. Surely those nice rooms all with a washroom would make excellent studio-type suites for seniors and that is not something that would require a lot of staff.
This building, in my opinion, can be re-profiled. I know the government gets nervous when we talk about that because all they see is the dollar signs and all the money that it’s going to cost, but we need to get real about our infrastructure here in the North.
We watched Doctors Without Borders on television treating people and providing medical care in grass huts. I mean, we have a building there that works. It’s functional. It’s operational. It’s viable.
I would like to today ask if this government could strike a committee with the Hay River’s Interagency to brainstorm, to come up with some ideas and if the Department of Public Works and Services can do a comprehensive, technical review of this facility so we know exactly what we’re working with and if there’s something that we can re-profile it into that’s useful to the North and to Hay River. Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Member for Range Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
