Glen Abernethy

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...

Thank you, Madam Chair. There are some ins and outs in this particular area. The anti-poverty position is one in; the Health Information Act is two in; there are some financial shared services positions being transferred out, three; there’s the full part-time senior policy advisor position in; and there are two Health Information Act positions in. So there are some ins and outs in this particular area. Thank you, Madam Chair.

I believe I mentioned these in my response to opening comments. Every year we come forward with significant supps for adult and children southern placements. In fact, this year again the Minister of Finance just tabled the supps and those supps include significant asks for actual costs related to adult and children placements. So we are asking for, in this budget, $2.8 million to be added to the budget for adult southern placements and $2.4 million for children southern placements. We recognize that the cost of southern placements is incredibly high and the director of social services has...

Once again, this is based on formula financing and the amount we get as revenues increases 2 percent annually. We will go back and see, we’ll be able to pull out from the mains what was there. So we’ll get an idea of what we expected to come in. What we actually spent, we’ll do our best. I don’t believe we’ll be able to go back 10 years, but we’ll go back as far as we can and some of it still might be projections because it would be really impossible to figure out just for Aboriginal people what the cost of health care was in the Northwest Territories, but we will do our best and we will try...

We provide services to residents from Nunavut here in the Northwest Territories. We charge Nunavut. The relationship between the residents of Nunavut and their government with respect to NIHB is done there. We don’t get involved in the discussions between Nunavut and the federal government. We have discussions with our residents who are covered by NIHB with the federal government. So a Nunavut resident comes in, whether they are NIHB or not NIHB, we provide services, we charge Nunavut, Nunavut then figures out their banking with respect to NIHB and the federal government. We’re not involved in...

Thank you. In different jurisdictions in the country things are funded in different ways on reserves and whatnot in southern Canada. By way of example, health services are paid by the NIHB First Nations Inuit Health Branch. In Canada, in the Northwest Territories rather, when we devolve down the responsibility for health care, we agreed to pay all those costs within our system. These dollars that you’re seeing here, as far as revenues, were negotiated back then. They grow at, I think, about 2 percent a year. Our costs have far exceeded that. So anything that is not covered by these dollars...

Thank you. The dollars you see on page 8-37 are for NIHB are not revenue. We’re not making money on that at all. We’re receiving the dollars and providing the service.

It’s different for every profession, as was indicated. The doctors would pay the licensing fee and that’s part of our revenue, but for professions like nurses, they’re paying their licensing fee to a territorial body or through them to a Canadian body. So they’d pay those, but we reimburse some of our nurses in the Northwest Territories that are employees. So the nurses aren’t showing up here, just the ones that are coming to us.