Norman Yakeleya

Under medical equipment under $50,000, the funding for the minor medical equipment purchases, I wanted to thank the Minister of Health. One time when he went to Colville Lake, that certainly helped us with a dental chair. I believe it was Mr. Miltenberger who was the Minister of Health at that time. These simple things in our health centres that we have medical equipment that sometimes gets overlooked. Certainly, now the people in Colville Lake talk about that incident where the Minister had to come to the health centre to look at some of the equipment that we have there. They were second hand...

I look forward to the plan the Minister is working on and how we move this plan forward. How many communities are without a nurse stationed at their health centres?

I’m looking forward to the actuals in the evaluation. We’re looking at the quality of medical services in our community. I wanted to ask the Minister on the monitoring of how many medevacs, and the Minister said he would look at the actuals. How many medevacs in the community for each month, is it monthly, seasonal, or annually? How we are measuring ourselves? Right now there’s one carrier that does all the medevacs in the Northwest Territories. How do we measure that in terms of services? They might be quite busy; they might be doing a really good job. I’m not too sure.

Like I said, there are...

Madam Chair, I have some questions I’m going to give to the Minister and get some response to my questions. I have two more questions.

Why are there two budgets, one for the air carrier and one for the medical service when other organizations can provide a service that accounts for both in the pricing? Thank you.

Madam Chair, the new contract is next year, so they are extending it until next year. As the Minister indicated, due to the evaluation or analysis of the medevacs, in that case what is the backup plan if it’s not possible to get medevacs out of the communities. What is the backup plan?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Part of the application for the hydraulic horizontal fracking would be, of course, the application. Is our government going to wait to see what type of information the application is going to be calling for, or are we going to go ahead and say, well, we have to look at the baseline for the water, quality of the air, the animals? I’m trying to get a sense that we have a good stance in terms of responding to the application that when it does come through, it is coming through.

The oil companies are very encouraged with the Canol shale play in the Sahtu. I want to ask the Minister, within the next couple months, I believe even by next month, there might be possibly an application going in for horizontal fracking in the Sahtu. The Minister has talked about the long term. Is there anything in the short term between now and the application that has reached the regulatory boards? Is this information going to be sufficient for us to judge it on the merits of this procedure?

I encourage the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to begin to pay close attention to all developments in the areas of protection and environmental stewardship, and to study best practices in other jurisdictions. We need to make the best choice and find ways to mitigate the impacts of this technology on our land, water, people and animals. Life flows from our water.

So I look forward to this Minister moving with his other colleagues and looking at where these dollars are going to be spent for the upcoming years. We have eight communities. I hope the Minister can forward me a list later on as to which communities do not have health nurses actually in the community, so that we can look at some proper staffing of these communities with some of these basic essential needs such as the health nurses in our communities. In the same line I will be asking questions to the Minister of Justice on communities that do not have RCMP, what type of plans are in place to...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to ask the Minister when his department will begin bringing forward plans to staff health centres or nursing stations that are without nurses in communities. How many communities does the Northwest Territories have without nurses at their health centres?