Glen Abernethy

I’ll say it again, that’s pretty much exactly what I just said I was going to provide, what we billed and what we received. No problem. We’ll provide that.

I think we actually need to see the audit to report first and see what it says and what the recommendations are. I will certainly work with committee to find out or put in place regional responses to those so we can actually improve and continue to provide high quality services to our residents in the area of child and family services. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The bio-med team that does the repairs on medical equipment throughout the Northwest Territories are employees of Stanton. They do, through agreements between Stanton and the other authorities, individual agreements, go out and provide services on those authorities’ equipment as necessary and it is billed back directly. This is one of the areas that we talk about on a regular basis being part of the back office and the shared services, because we could certainly benefit from economies of scale by having them providing services at a territorial level with not having to bill every time they go...

The Member can correct me if I’ve misunderstood him. If the Member is asking us to share our inter-jurisdictional reciprocal billing agreements on how things are charged, no problem.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I haven’t seen that audit and I won’t see that audit until pretty much the same time Members do. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Our health facilities, Stanton, by way of example based on the staff, provide services based on demand. So, if there is an increased demand as a result of Nunavut, they have built that into their planning process so that they can ensure that residents receive timely services.

Mr. Chair, the actual cost for all procedures is negotiated on an inter-jurisdictional reciprocal agreement. We believe right now that we are collecting all the dollars owed based on the formulas that we have agreed to.

Thank you. It started in 1988 and it’s a set agreement. There is no end date, there is no opportunity to renegotiate.

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.