Julie Green

Yes, thank you the Stanton Legacy building will have 72 beds of 74 beds of longterm care. They won't all open at once; they're not all needed at once. But we anticipate opening 17 of them in the next fiscal year. And the building will be ready to have more beds phased in as necessary. The project in Hay River in particular, had there not been a flood this year, would have continued on to a nearer completion. But unfortunately, we have to wait until we know what the new flood maps look like before we select a location for that. Thank you

Yes, thank you. There are a lot of unknowns at this point because the location has not been fixed. We know a lot about the 51st Street location, but the Northern Frontier Visitors Centre location has a number of challenges. And for additional detail, I'll ask Mr. Heath to fill in.

Yes, the estimated completion time by the contractor is the end of this calendar year. There will need to be a commissioning period, and then the various components that are occupying the building the extended care unit, the longterm care beds on the third floor, and the Frame Lake clinic, audiology, and rehab on the main floor. Those will be phased in the next fiscal year. So just as a reminder, this is the capital budget. So there will be O and M costs that will come in the form of a supplementary appropriation. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. We met with the City of Yellowknife. They've expressed an interest in having the shelter located near the old Northern Frontier Visitors Centre, which is where the current day shelter is. There's been no decision yet on that location. There are a number of pros and cons to each of the locations in consideration. Thank you.

Yes, thank you as I mentioned, the site of the Hay River longterm care, which is the old HH William's site, flooded in the spring. And so there's a question about whether that site is still suitable for building the longterm care on. So that location is now in question. In 2021, the location that we had planned for the Fort Simpson longterm care flooded. So that location is also in question. So that's one of the reasons that these schedules have been adjusted. I'll just ask Mr. Heath if he would like to add anything further to the Hay River project, which was the project we thought was...

I do, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate the question. I don't see it as a binary situation here. The specified conditions' list covers 54 diseases. If you have ALS, as one example, you're not on that list. You're not getting any help from the government of the NWT. So the starting point was to make the program more equitable for people who not only have drug costs for chronic conditions but they also don't have any drug coverage at all. So that means for the most basic things like antibiotics. So the thing about this is that people and their conditions don't fit into these little silos very...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Department of Health and Social Services is working to make the extended health benefits more equitable. And we put out a number of products here, a discussion paper at FAQ, and a plain language summary, which talks about the supplementary health benefits for low income people, and a drug program for catastrophic costs. The amount of money we're spending right now on this, the 54 specified disease conditions, is $4.3 million, and that's for 1,514 individuals. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, first of all, the Member has raised this issue about cancer drugs, and I want to give him a specific answer to this. If somebody has cancer and they're receiving treatment in a hospital, those drugs are provided to the person without any means testing or any charge. If after the cancer treatment there is a prescription that is preventative, like tamoxifen for breast cancer, then that is part of the specified condition list, and it would be captured in this new program. So, again, in response to his points, there is there is consideration for a drug benefit...

Thank you. We're in the information gathering phase, and I'm gratified to say we've been getting a lot of feedback. So we don't have a specific model that we can apply costing to. But given the fact that we're going to include more benefits for more people, we expect the program to cost more. Thank you.