Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. In my statement, I did mention that, you know, it is the Minister's responsibility to extend the public health emergency. And so my first question for the Minister is what criteria information is the Minister using to measure risk of a public health emergency to be to extend the order? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes. Minister responsible for Health and Social Services.
Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's a process laid out in the Public Health Act. The CPHO is an independent health official, a medical doctor. That person evaluates the situation and determines the risk of the disease to the public. That person then creates public health orders that would mitigate that risk. And that advice comes to me, and I declare a state of emergency to give force to the orders that the Chief Public Health Officer has made. So I am taking advice from the Chief Public Health Officer who is looking at the technical risk assessments, which I do not have a level of training to assess myself. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you to the Minister for that answer. And I'm sure it's very technical. I'm sure even myself, I wouldn't be able to understand a lot of the information without support. So I'm just wondering, also, my next question is, is this decision just the decision of the sole Minister with this information, or is it a group Cabinet decision to extend this public health emergency? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Yeah, thank you. I would anticipate consulting my Cabinet colleagues on declaring the state of emergency in the first place. But the extensions that happen every two weeks, I make that decision alone. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, you know, I know in this jurisdiction, like in the Northwest Territories, our act is different than the Yukon; it's different than other provinces. And some of them, they work collaboratively to come up with decisions. But we, as in Northwest Territories residents, we need to know what risks are left. We were told like, in my Member statement the other day, we were told you know, we crushed the curve, like I said. You know, we've got vaccinations now. We've got you know, we've got public health contact tracing for an outbreak. We've got many things in place now. So I, we as Northwest Territories residents, my constituents, probably many of your constituents need and want to know what more do we have to do? What are the measures that need to be reached in order for us to come out of this public health emergency? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Yes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the Member's frustration but what we learned in Yellowknife in the month of May is that everything can change overnight, where one case at a school ultimately became 71 cases with a thousand contacts and 43 households in isolation. The key thing there was we had a large unvaccinated group who are not eligible for vaccines because of their age, and we had 40 percent of the people there, the youth, were asymptomatic. So they didn't know they had COVID. They had no symptoms of it. And another something like 20 percent had only one symptom, and a minor symptom like a runny nose, not a major symptom like problems breathing. And so I think what's really important to know is that we are still at risk for the importation of COVID from travellers in particular. And as long as the cases continue to be high in Alberta, that will be a consideration. The vaccine rates will be a consideration as well. So the end goal here is not to frustrate people but to ensure that our effective public health measures continue to be effective to keep us safe. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So my last question will be will the Minister commit to providing some type of information or working with her Cabinet and with the CPHO to come up with a list or something for us as residents in the Northwest Territories to know how much longer we're going to be in this public health emergency, what needs to happen to get out of the public health emergency, because we all know that we could live with this forever and we may never reach immunization rates that want to be reached, you know. So I would like to know some kind of documentation, some information for us to know what we need to meet before we get out of this public health emergency? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I think what the Member needs to take a look at, and I'm certainly very interested in seeing as well, is the Emerging Wisely revision. It's my understanding that this is the purpose of that document, is to show us the path forward out of the restrictions that we're in now how do we get there, what are the benchmarks. And so as we know, that's going to come at some point in the first part of June and I certainly hope to see the answers to the Member's question at that time. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife North.
