Jane Groenewegen

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in my Member’s statement I attempted to describe what I think is a process that is in place that would allow a panel of peers of physicians to receive complaints and deal with complaints about the conduct of physicians who practice in the Northwest Territories. I would like to ask the Minister: could she please describe for me what the process is? What is in place currently in the Northwest Territories? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I also will be supporting the bill as it is brought forward today. I, along with colleagues, do so with mixed emotions, with mixed feelings about this. I hope we’ve learned some very good lessons from this approach that we took to this capital project. I think that once we decided to try to bring this project to reality through a way that could be described as -- I don’t know what the word is -- through the back door, for sure. This was not through the front door. This came to us through the back door and the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation, you know, the...

Mr. Speaker, to be clear, what is driving this change to our policy on supplementary health benefits? From what I understand is the projected costs going forward and the sustainability of those costs and also the people who are not currently receiving coverage, there’s a group, there’s a gap, there’s a group that are left out. If it is the cost that is driving this review, I think that the issue of cost, which Ms. Lee has indicated, is not something easy to quantify. It is difficult to have a fulsome debate on this when we don’t know what those costs would be. Because those are the kinds of...

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask questions to the Minister of Health and Social Services primarily from the point of view of the concerns of my constituents in Hay River who are senior citizens.

Now, I first of all want to say that we have a remarkable package of services and support under our health and social services system for the seniors in the Northwest Territories. We have chosen, we have paid for that, we have done that. I need to know what analysis has been done about the impacts or the potential impacts of now pulling that back and not having that. We hear about the cost of living in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I, too, today would like to speak about the supplementary health benefits review. Mr. Speaker, the Hay River Seniors’ Society has met to discuss the supplementary health benefits consultation, and I had the benefit of attending two sessions with the seniors.

Hay River is the second largest community in the Northwest Territories and is the home of many seniors who have retired after careers served there and some have ended their careers after serving in various other northern communities. Hay River has long been considered an ideal place to retire due to the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So it is about the redistribution of resources. It is taking resources which are now expended on behalf of those seniors who are in a certain income bracket and re-profiling those resources to a group of people who are not receiving them. So it is a redistribution of the resources this government has. But if we were given a number and we were told, Members of the Legislature, if we would commit to expend this much money, we could take care of the folks who aren’t being looked after plus we could leave the Seniors Supplementary Health Benefits the way they are. But how...

Mr. Speaker, because the seniors who are currently receiving the benefit of this program regardless of income who are over 60 years of age in the Northwest Territories have planned that they would have this coverage, have become accustomed to this coverage, has the Department of Health and Social Services given any thought to grandfathering those folks who are already covered by this and phasing in a change to supplementary health benefits so that younger people like myself, for example, could begin at an earlier age to start to plan for the fact that they may need to think about insurance or...

Mr. Speaker, based on the above, it is the position of the Hay River Seniors’ Society that the GNWT should place a high priority on the allocation of sufficient financial resources to support all NWT seniors not covered through other government programs for the provision of the existing supplementary health benefits regardless of their economic position or circumstances. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I have very recently met with the person who would like to be the proponent for this project, understanding, though, that it may need to be a government project so to speak, but then the economy would come in where we would have a savings on the fuel and the economy could be created by the people who would be participating in the harvesting of the material to make the wood pellets.

Mr. Speaker, this has been quite a long while in the works and I had just recently met with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Patterson Jr., and he had asked me to request the Minister if we could have a sit down, face-to-face...

This is great. This is the first time I had a set of questions back to back. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will make this very brief.

The prospects of a pellet mill at Patterson Sawmill in Hay River have been supported by this government by way of a study that has been composed. Mr. Speaker, just to make a long story short, the cost of the infrastructure and the operations, significantly the power, is a huge consideration in this. Although there is product out there to be harvested that could make the manufacturing of pellets in Hay River viable, the upfront costs and some of the ongoing costs...