Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d certainly like to get some more details from the Member on a particular case. Medical travel hasn’t changed. It is under review, as I’ve mentioned many times in this House, and we will be discussing any potential changes. None have been made yet with Members as we move forward. But I would certainly be interested to get more detail on this particular case. If the Member would like to share those with me, I’d certainly be willing to hear them. Thank you.

In the Member’s statement he talked about the Foster Family Coalition in the Northwest Territories, and I’d like to take this opportunity to applaud the coalition for providing a unified voice dedicated to improving the quality of life for children in the Northwest Territories. I think they do an incredibly important job. We work with the coalition to help encourage people to become foster parents, and the coalition is getting out across the Northwest Territories with departmental staff providing training and information sessions to encourage people to become foster parents. I think our...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is actually a fairly complex question because there are so many different scenarios where we could apply. It really depends on the nature or the reason the child has entered into the child and family services system.

If a family member asks another family member to take care of their child, there are no supports, but if the child enters the child and family services system by way of the legislation that we have available to us today and the goal is obviously to keep the children in their communities or with families as much as possible, we want families to be whole...

We don’t have that type of data, but we will be looking at improving our record keeping and be able to have more solid record keeping and be able to provide more timely statistics to all Members of the House, including Cabinet, once we have passed the Health Information Act and it moves forward via…(inaudible)…we will have the ability to track data on a more real time basis. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have directed the department to pull that information together. It hasn’t been pulled together at this point, but we will get it to the Member at our earliest convenience. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

What we want to do is provide quality care to all the residents of the Northwest Territories. We want to make sure that our residents have access. I’m not going to presuppose the finding of the review of the ISDM, but we are looking for ways to improve the services that are provided in all of our communities. As I’ve indicated, we will be doing that review. I don’t have a timeline in front of me today, but I will get back to the Member with a bit more clarity on how long that review is going to take. I’m really interested in getting input from the Member as well as committee as we move forward...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize a couple of different individuals. First I’d like to recognize Dr. Ewan Affleck who I mentioned earlier as the champion of electronic medical records, and he was recently awarded the Order of Canada. I’d like to thank him for his commitment to improving health care services for the Northwest Territories.

I’d also like to recognize another important group of individuals, our Anti-Poverty Advisory Committee, who is helping us with the development of the territorial response to the Anti-Poverty Framework. They are Chief Minnie Letcher of the Liidlii K...

Mr. Speaker, off the top of my head, the only one that I could think of would actually be potential smuggling and that would be something that we would have to consider as well. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe it was just a couple of days ago that Member Dolynny talked about some of the statistics with respect to smoking and that we are actually finally seeing a bit of a decrease in smoking rates in the Northwest Territories. Having said that, we still have higher rates than pretty much everywhere else in the country and obviously more needs to be done.

We do have some wonderful programs. We’ve all heard of Don’t Be a Butthead, and there are a number of programs out there as well. I know Mr. Moses actually referenced a number of them the other day.

Obviously, we are...

It’s an intriguing idea and then it could… Obviously, if something like that existed, it could stretch to sugar, it could stretch to other things as well. I don’t know if we actually have the capacity to do something like that, but I would certainly be willing to have some conversations with the department and some more discussions with committee to see what options exist. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.