Glen Abernethy

Clearly, we had some growing pains as we rolled out this new approach on renewing health care cards. We do provide notification to people. We are limited in providing it to known addresses and if people move or they change their post office boxes, we may occasionally miss an individual. I don’t know the situation you’re describing and if you want to share the details with me, please, so that we can insert it into our quality assurance process to make sure that we learn from it and make sure that that type of thing doesn’t happen again. I would say that we have experienced improvement since our...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Long-term care would be under territorial services as opposed to community services, but I understand the Member’s point. Obviously, with an aging population, this is something that we all need to be conscious and aware of, especially how that’s going to roll out and affect communities in the long-term.

We have the continuing care report that was distributed to Members early this week highlighting where we are now and where we need to go. That’s going to help us inform our Aging in Place Strategy. So, as we move forward with this Aging in Place Strategy we’ll start to...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The deputy did describe some of the growth, and some of those areas that are growing in the directorate are in direct response to committee and government priorities such as the anti-poverty. A number of positions, as the deputy indicated, are to address moving forward with the Health Information Act and making sure that people understand and that we have the people in positions. It’s about six positions in the directorate. On average, positions are about $100,000-plus, though $600,000 is pretty much the exact growth in this particular area so I think it correlates...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. A number of these items were covered in the THSSI funding that I described yesterday. We’ve put it in 2014-15 and the Department of Finance has agreed to cover these on a one-time basis. The original plan with the THSSI funding, we were always supposed to have an exit strategy. That exit strategy was never fully developed and/or implemented. If we had cut many of these programs that are in place now without having some sort of transition plan, we would have adversely affected these services going to all NWT residents. So we were able to put money in for this year and we...

I do know that Norman Wells was providing some back fill to the community of Tulita with respect to the social workers, but I don’t actually know the current status of the social worker position in Tulita.

We’re constantly working with the authorities, trying to find solutions to their communities’ challenges. We do have positions established for particular purposes, but if the community needs are such, we are always open to have some discussions as long as it’s within the same area of mandate.

No, they wouldn’t.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to committee for putting forward this motion. The particular pilots that were mentioned are actually pilots that are being run by the Department of Education, Culture and Employment, but recognizing that there’s a lot of similarity in some of the things that we’re trying to do with respect to early childhood development and the communities. We do have our Healthy Family programs, and we do have those currently in 15 communities throughout the Northwest Territories, and some of those communities are providing supports to other communities. We have put money in...

The answer is no, because these 1,392 positions are active. They’re not inactive, so there’s no plan to move them from something they aren’t to something that they currently are.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. With respect to grants and contributions, there have been about six-ish million dollars in increases. I can just walk through some of those. We’ve had some Collective Agreement increases for both the authorities, including Hay River. That’s about $1.9-plus million. We’ve got some initiatives we are working on that are priorities of the Legislature, which is the Midwifery Program expansion, that’s $470,000. We have the Northern Alberta Renal Program, a much smaller amount, $1,000 it looks like in direct program delivery. This is the one-time funding that we’ve talked about...

Madam Chair, we need to do something different. We’re not providing services to the best results that we can. We do have to have a territorial approach to a number of functions that exist, things like IT/IS/IM, procurement, our physician services, some financial systems.

The Member asked about some financial reports. It’s incredibly difficult to get a real comprehensive financial analysis done at a territorial level because every authority runs on their own unique financial system, which complicates things. So it’s not about taking anything away from the communities or regions, but it’s...