Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I’m pretty sure that the situation the Member is describing didn’t happen while I was here because I certainly don’t remember it. It must have been a long time ago that it actually happened. The piece that I said after the mic went off was: Anything we do still has to be within standards, so it has to meet certain criteria. We’re open to that. I’m happy to have discussions with the communities, with the regions. I’ll be travelling with the Member to visit his communities at some point. I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to have that discussion and hear what the...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, a couple of those positions, or rather the funding, was as a result of the midwifery program. There was some positions allocated to Inuvik for the midwifery program that was going to go there. The program evolved into a different model. The positions were never established, although they had showed up in previous mains. We are discontinuing the midwifery positions in the Beaufort Delta with the exception of the nurse practitioner who is providing the pre and postnatal services, working on the regional midwifery program up there in cooperation with the doctors...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The dollars that are coming in are as a result of the court case. It may be better to ask the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment some of those questions. As a result they are responsible for the actual… They lead the rollout of the response to the court case. Just for the record, the court case was based on a constitutional challenge against the Government of the Northwest Territories which we lost, and we had a constitutional obligation to meet the remedy that was outlined by the courts. This is Health and Social Services’ part. There is actually much larger...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m happy to answer the question now or we can wait till page 195 where that actually falls. It’s up to you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, in anticipation of the Daniels ruling, I actually did raise this before the ruling was actually given at the last FPT meeting, and there was certainly interest among all the provincial/territorial Ministers to see that ruling go the way it went and to get some additional dollars from the federal government. At that time, they did not indicate what they would do if the ruling came down as it did. We have discussed this at the Cabinet table and I know that DAAIR and Finance are aware. We’re waiting for some indication as to what the federal government plans to do...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Unfortunately, we are not as far along as we would like it. We have basically done everything that we need to do on our end. We had agreements to move forward with the Alberta government. Since their election, it has put a bit of a hold. They have indicated that they’re still happy for us to come on board, but they weren’t ready or prepared to actually begin that process. They had other things they needed to take care of in Alberta. We will be part of the Alberta registry, and that’s what the onetime costs were to set up our portals and those types of things to allow NWT...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is exactly why we’re moving forward with the home and continuing care action plan. It’s going to help us identify what we currently have, where the demands are, where the draw is, and what we need to do to meet the ongoing demand for home care services across the Northwest Territories, including small communities such as the ones the Member has described.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, these were internal re-allocations. I believe they were vacant, but we will confirm.

I can’t remember the exact date of the court case, but it was actually a number of years ago. It took the Government of the Northwest Territories a couple years to actually figure out how we’re going to bring in this or meet our obligation under that court ruling, and we rolled it out during the 2014-15 fiscal year.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I mean without seeing the details, we can’t say sure, but that sounds like that meets the criteria for this particular fund, and obviously we’d love to see a proposal, but I mean until we see the detail it’d be impossible to say whether it met the criteria or not. We could share the criteria with the Member, he could share it with the community and I mean we’d be happy to see a proposal.