Glen Abernethy

This is a very exciting initiative. Child and youth care counsellors will be an important part of the overall continuum of mental wellness services for children, youth, as well as families. They will work in the schools and the broader community and will work in an integrated fashion with other communitybased professionals to ensure person and familycentred services are delivered as close to home as possible.

This is an incredibly important resource that is required in all regions, and it needs to be implemented thoughtfully and with input from all involved stakeholders. We are working with the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to recognize the members of the Antipoverty Advisory Committee as visitors in the gallery today. The committee plays an important role in helping to guide the planning for annual antipoverty roundtables. They have helped us to establish performance measures for poverty in the Northwest Territories, and they do a hard work in reviewing the applications to the Antipoverty Fund. I really respect their guidance and their commitment to the Northwest Territories and residents and communities. I am happy to have them here with us today. We have with us here...

I appreciate that the Member thinks that this is easy and it can be done with the stroke of a pen, but if we are going to make a change on some financial levels, we need to understand the implications of those. We need to understand why. I will say that in cases of undue hardship, where a family is experiencing some significant difficulty, we are willing to look at these on a oneoff, oneonone basis to make sure that we are not really disadvantaging families where there is undue hardship.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I do not know what the rationale for the $80,000 co-payment is or, rather, the level of the $80,000 co-payment. I know that my predecessor once referred to it as an arbitrary number. Clearly, we need to review the use of co-payment and the amount of the co-payment. That work is currently being done as part of the medical travel review, where we are reviewing a number of aspects of the medical travel policy, including the co-payment. We want to take into consideration not just the family income, but the size of the family; the illness that the individual...

I do not sit on one of the Regional Wellness Councils. The Regional Wellness Councils are the ones who, to some degree, determine when they are going to schedule their meetings. They are required to have one meeting, I think it is annually in public. All their meetings are supposed to be in public to some degree. They can go in camera. I am not prepared to, and I am not going to, dictate when and where they have their meetings. I think we need to leave that up to them. They know their regions best, and they know when they need to get together to have those conversations.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I know that we do have some resources out there when it comes to H. pylori and providing information. As far as workshops, I'm not sure that we've actually provided workshops in the past or that we actually have the information to provide workshops, but I will talk to the department to find out how best we can get that information out to residents of the Sahtu but also to the Northwest Territories where appropriate. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Through our discussion with stakeholders across the Northwest Territories, one of the things we constantly hear are that options are important and that one size does not fit all when it comes to programming. The use of technology to assist in delivering services to more remote communities is one that the department is exploring. In the meantime, we do have a number of mechanisms where individuals can receive services, including our 24/7 NWT Help Line. We have the opportunity through things like Facebook to do group sessions, group counselling sessions. There is the Kids Help Phone. As...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, prior to the move to a single authority, the Beaufort Delta Regional Health and Social Services Authority had a really good relationship with the IRC and the Gwich'in. I am confident that that relationship is still strong and still working since we have moved to a single authority. I know that the regional operation of the territorial authority has worked closely with the IRC in the delivery of some training, things like applied suicide intervention training and others. At a departmental level, we have worked with different Aboriginal and Indigenous...

Mr. Speaker, the priorities of the 18th Legislative Assembly include a commitment to take action so that seniors can age in place. Our government’s mandate builds on this priority by committing the Department of Health and Social Services to complete a projection of programming needs, develop updated capital plans to address the need for long-term care beds, and to develop a regulatory framework and financing options that will allow us to meet the growing demand for long-term care in the Northwest Territories.

As Minister of Health and Social Services, I remain committed to supporting seniors...

The review of medical travel actually started in the last Assembly. There was a significant amount of public consultation that was done. The department went out and sought information from users of the system from across the Northwest Territories. A lot of data was gathered.

A number of things have happened. We have put in an appeal process, I personally think it still needs a little bit of tweaking, and we have put out a handbook to help people understand and navigate the system, but clearly, more needs to be done. The area the Member is talking about is certainly one of the areas in which we...