Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Madam Chair. According to the report distributed previously, as of October 31, 2013, there were nine vacant positions in the Sahtu. Currently, of those nine positions, six have been filled, two are in competition in progress and there’s still one that needs to be advertised. We haven’t gone out for staffing on that one, or, rather, the Sahtu Health and Social Services Authority is waiting to get that in the queue.

There are O and M dollars associated in some of these program areas; salary is a portion. But for some of the specifics to help explain the accounting behind some of this, I’ll go to Ms. Mathison.

I don’t remember what I said.

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.

As of November 2013, there is about $2.54 million owed to the GNWT by Nunavut for health services. These receivables are clearly within acceptable time limits for payments, and accounts are considered up to date. We continue to receive dollars from them on a regular basis.

Per the GNWT public accounts as of March 31, 2012, there was about $9.7 million owed to the GNWT by Nunavut, so that shows that we do collect on a regular basis, based on the actual costs.

Thank you. We can certainly go back and pull out main estimates for the last 20-some years and show what was budgeted here and what was received here, but as far as what we spent or the cost for providing services to the Aboriginal people only would be darn near impossible to provide back that far.

We provide services in the Northwest Territories for Nunavut residents and we charge Nunavut back for those services. Therefore, it is a revenue we are bringing in which is why it appears on this revenue page.

As I indicated, for bodies like nurses, their registration fees are not coming to us and we would never be able to account that as revenue. But for people like physicians and social workers that pay their licensing fees to us, that would be, and the Member is right; through terms and conditions of employment we might be offsetting it a little bit for social workers, but we’ll do a bit of an analysis on this to indicate or show what we’re actually taking out and if we pay anything out of this particular area.

Thank you. I don’t understand the question. Maybe the Member could clarify a little bit, that would be great.