Glen Abernethy

Mr. Speaker, this Legislative Assembly has committed to support early childhood development, and today I want to provide Members and the public with an update on our work to provide equitable access to a range of inclusive, culturally-informed programs and services for and children under five years of age and expecting parents.

In June 2017, our government tabled a renewed three-year Early Childhood Development Action Plan designed to help us take action at several sensitive times of a child's development. For the past two years, we have worked with parents, elders, healthcare practitioners...

Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes, that Bill 40, Smoking Control and Reduction Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Some of that information has already been made public. We have been clear on what types of services and what services will be going into the Stanton legacy building. The extended care will be there. Long-term care will be there, and there will be a number of other services, including some of the rehab services, the primary care clinics, and other things. Those are going to be in the old Stanton.

Like I said, I am happy to sit down with the Member. I was able to find that information when I looked. I would be happy to sit down with the Member and figure out what is missing from the average user...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. May 26th is fast approaching. It is going to be an incredibly important day for the healthcare system, and it is also going to be a very complex and busy day. In order to ensure that we have little-to-no patient interruption or reduction in services during that time, we have been doing a significant amount of planning.

Health Care Relocations Inc. has been contracted to guide the Stanton team and the Stanton staff through transition planning. Operational readiness activities have been under way since November 2016, with the creation of 17 different transition planning...

Yes, please, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the Member for his comments. I didn't hear a question, but I will note for the Member that, on this particular page, you will see an increase of $782,000. That is for the Norman Wells health centre and long-term care to help us continue to roll out the services there.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Those are based on demand. Not an increase in the level of coverage, but in the number of people accessing, or possibly the complexity of some of the cases. Many different clinical things could drive those costs. We know the costs are up, and we want to make sure we have the dollars to cover them, so the increase is for that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If the Member were to go back and review Hansard, she would notice that the first indication was, in the first year we got those dollars, we lapsed over $900,000. That was mostly because of the fact that we had to create positions, get positions evaluated, get positions established, and then go out and recruit and attempt to fill those positions. That work does take a bit of time, and, as a result, we did not fill the positions on day one of the fiscal year, and we ended up lapsing $900,000. By the second fiscal year, we had all of the positions established. We had all of...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We have been working for a while with the shelters and the shelter network to develop a funding formula that makes sense. We are not a hundred percent done that work, but we figured we had made enough progress to build a solid business case that would allow us to start making valuable increases in this area, which is why you see the $500,000 increase, which represents about a 15-percent increase overall to the shelters.

What we do know is that a lot of other jurisdictions are only partially funded in this area and that they raise a lot of money on their own, which is true...

We do have a long way to go, as the Member knows. We have a bit of a backlog that we need to work our way through to the point where we can actually have quicker turnaround times on all of our files, to have a standard or a more reasonable wait time for initial assessments, but we need to get rid of some of the backlog. We need to work through some of the backlog.

It is going to be a lot of work. I can't say that we are going to see immediate improvement and a more reasonable wait time immediately. It is going to take us a bit of time, but we are now in a position to start knocking off some of...