Glen Abernethy

Once again the Member can correct me if I’m wrong; it sounds like he’s asking us to provide what we’ve billed and what we’ve received on a historic basis. I’d be happy to do so.

Mr. Chair, as I indicated, they staff based on demand, and demand does include Nunavut residents who are coming for services. Granted, those numbers are fairly low. Most of our residents, the vast majority, are obviously from the Northwest Territories. If there were no Nunavut patients, we may be in a position where there would be fewer employees at Stanton because we would have less demand. Stanton bases their employment structure and how many people they staff based on their demand.

I think I’m saying what the Member is saying. It doesn’t have an adverse effect on our residents because, if...

I was one of the Members who actually participated in the review of the child and family services delivered by the Government of the Northwest Territories in the last Assembly and I am aware of all those recommendations. Since I’ve become the Minister, I have had an opportunity to follow up with the department to see where we are on a number of those recommendations. There has been a lot of work in the background being done, but there is a lot of work that still needs to be done and, obviously, we still need to continue to make improvements. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, we have no indication that we haven’t collected all of our dollars, recognizing that the inter-jurisdictional reciprocal agreements are negotiated every year, but we do collect all the dollars based on what we are able to charge based on the agreements we have in place.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I remember during the last Assembly there was a lot of discussion around this because there was a fair amount owing at a particular point in time and there were some issues. I believe those issues, actually I know those issues were resolved before the end of the last government. Right now we have an inter-jurisdictional agreement that’s based on cost recovery. We don’t make money on this from Nunavut, but at the same time other provinces don’t make money off of us when our residents are receiving services out of jurisdiction. We collect the dollars, as I said to Mr...

Those numbers are provided as money owed from Nunavut to the GNWT for a variety of services, not all health related, to government as a whole.

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...

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.