Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I appreciate all the comments and suggestions that I have received over the last two days, especially in the areas of homecare, antipoverty, and youth mental health and addictions. These are areas that are clearly in our mandate, and I would suggest that there is no disagreement with anybody on committee that these are areas that we have to invest in and make sure that we are doing more and better work moving forward in this Assembly. You know, to repeat myself, it is completely consistent with the mandate that we have accepted as the 19 Members.

Having said...

There has never actually been a budget allocated to a managed alcohol program. It is a commitment we have made, but as I indicated last October, our first priority is to get a sobering centre in place. A sobering centre is probably the most ideal location to have a managed alcohol program.

Since then, it has come to our attention that the City of Yellowknife has put in an application to the federal government for a managed alcohol-type program. We are waiting to see what the results are there, and whether or not they are going to need us to be involved, partnering in providing some technical...

Sure, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, during the last sitting, I indicated a willingness and a desire to move the day shelter. At that time, I also indicated that we were hoping to tie it in with a sobering centre and coshare a location; separate entrances because they are different programs, but coshare a location.

Unfortunately, we have had an incredibly hard time finding a location downtown for a sobering centre. I think we have looked at as many as 12 properties, and all of them had to be rejected for one reason or another. Some of them were space issues. Others were landlords weren't...

Mr. Speaker, I know that there's some social infrastructure money that is available by application by the provinces and territories. I believe the Housing Corporation has been able to get some of those dollars. Those dollars are going to be used for basing the criteria. It's my understanding that those dollars are only available for independent living units in communities throughout the Northwest Territories, so it probably won't directly help with the long-term care. In the territories, where we want to do more to help people age in place and stay out of long-term care, the 258 is based on a...

With the reduction in the Canada Health Transfer from 6 per cent to 3 per cent, which was actually implemented by the Conservative government prior to the election but adhered to and supported by the Liberal government when they came in, we were going to take a significant reduction in growth in CHT moving forward. That reduction has been maintained; it's still going to be 3 per cent, but on top of that we are going to get $6.1 million and $7.4 million for aging in place, long-term care, homecare, as well as mental health.

Those dollars are limited funding so they are time-sensitive. They come...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I know the department works very closely with the pharmacy association and others to ensure that prescriptions are being dispensed appropriately. For the detail, I don't have that at my fingertips, so I will take the question as notice and get back to the Member. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Just before I go to that question, I would just like to point out that, in the Northwest Territories, following up on the honourable Member for Yellowknife North, we are looking to put in a sobering centre here in Yellowknife, which I know is not a treatment centre, but it is certainly a step in the right direction to providing a local facilitybased type support to those individuals that are struggling.

The Member is right. We have facilitybased treatment programs that are available that can tend to be very clinical. Poundmaker's is really fantastic in the fact that it provides a lot of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'd like to correct the honourable Member just a little bit. There are a multiple number of programs available to residents in the Northwest Territories. We have community counsellors throughout the Northwest Territories, we've been running on-the-land programs across the Northwest Territories with our Aboriginal partners. We have piloted and we're looking to do more pilots of a mobile treatment option, which is a treatment-type program that can move from region to region rather than relying strictly on a particular facility. We travelled throughout the...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I am happy to go back and go through each of those lines, but this is a consolidation page of all the other pages that we've gone through, and when we were discussing the other pages many of the Members asked questions of why did this go up or why did this go down and we answered a number of those questions at that time. So to answer that question, we'd probably have to go back through the departments because every division, every section, is having some increases and decreases as a result of forced growth, new initiatives, and those types of things. This is...