Glen Abernethy

On page 8-11 it shows 1,392 positions in the authorities. Those are all established funded positions. The authorities manage their budgets, manage their staff to provide the services that are outlined and they believe they need these positions to do them. I’m not aware of the authorities planning to make any of these positions inactive or to reactivate any other positions, but they may, but that is not the expectation. The expectation is they’ll fill positions and provide the services that are required.

Hold on one second.

Madam Chair, we’re not actually talking about amalgamating boards, we’re talking about creating a central approach, a unified approach to providing health and social services and having shared functions coordinated across all the entities, possibly with a central territorial body that would be more of a virtual organization. It doesn’t really need to be located in one particular area and it could have individuals from what are all the authorities now participating. We’re not talking about amalgamation. We know and we believe, and I believe, that there still needs to be regional entities...

Thank you, Madam Chair. It seems vaguely familiar. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the same question that Mr. Bromley asked earlier. It’s six positions. If you average them out to about $100,000 per, it’s about $600,000 and we can provide the detail to the Member. We’ll print off Hansard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This was an issue that came up in the 16th Assembly and I think additional money was put in so that it established committees throughout the Northwest Territories. I know the department has been eager to establish these starting late in the 16th Assembly and certainly into the beginning of the 17th Assembly, but at the end of the day we don’t have any and there seems to be very little interest or uptake at the community level.

In principle, by intent, the reason these committees were put into the act is absolutely sound, but there’s obviously a disconnect somewhere in our...

As the director of finance pointed out, there’s no job loss with these things; some things have been re-profiled. The authorities have a mandate or requirement to provide services to meet the needs of their residents in their particular region and they do, from time to time, have to describe some of their work and change some of their positions and they would come through the normal process to do that to meet their mandate that we approve through this process.

I’d like to thank the Member for the question. Home care is an incredibly important service that we provide in the Northwest Territories through our individual authorities, and we anticipate the demand on home care services is going to grow as we have an aging population and we’re supporting them to age in place.

The Member has averaged out the demand based on a by-community total, which may not be a fair way of splitting or rationalizing how many home support workers are in each community because every community is different, every community has got a different aging population and different...

We don’t anticipate savings through the exercise we are going through. What we’re trying to do is streamline services so we can provide the best results to residents of the Northwest Territories in all communities and regions. That includes having some back office functions where shared activities can be done at a territorial level regardless of the region it happens to be located in. Authorities and boards can work together to get economies of scale. We don’t believe it is going to save us money, but it will give us greater control over future spending because we will be able to get some...

Thank you, Madam Chair. There are a large number of services that have become available over the years that are not currently covered under our insured services. Our insured services coverage is fairly dated and it hasn’t really had a very comprehensive review in some time, which is one of the reasons why we’ve created the chief clinical advisor position to help us actually do this analysis to make sure that the types of things that are covered under insured services are really keeping with the times, and the fact that the health system does change and evolve and new programs and services come...

I don’t believe we have that detail. I do remember in the last government when the supplementary health debate occurred in the House, there was some recognition by the department that we would find ways to encourage people to obtain some sort of third-party insurance, whether it’s through employers or other things. I’m not currently aware of the status of that, but I will talk to the department, I will get an update and I’ll provide that to committee.