Norman Yakeleya

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to ask the Minister how the new program will affect young working mothers who make enough that they will be expected to cover their own extended health care and might have to decide to either buy food or buy medicine.

Will the program the Minister is proposing resolve the new costs for this government while you’re trying to manage the changes within the existing program budget?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today to speak to the issue of the supplementary health care coverage. Tommy Douglas was voted the greatest Canadian of all time by the CBC contest back in 2004. Why? Because he is considered to be the father of medicare for all Canadians.

I might vote for my mother as being the greatest Canadian. Why? Because she told me something that broke my heart when I was a young man. She told me how as a mother with eight kids she once had to go without food for herself for two days so she could feed us and still buy the medical care she needed for one of my brothers. We...

I want to ask the Minister, for example, what are the implications or consequences of requirements for new funding for residents in small communities if we were to not go ahead with the proposed program?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to ask the Minister, regarding my Member’s statement, if she would agree that the program that she is proposing could be better explained to the people. I understand that some people in my riding were approached in terms of signing a petition, but they didn’t know what they were signing for in terms of the supplementary health benefit. That’s the question I have for the department. Can this proposed program be better explained to the people in my riding or in Yellowknife?

The Minister has indicated that she’s going to follow up on this incident and she’s going to have a discussion with her department and certainly the Sahtu Health Board in terms of what happened. In this discussion, I want to ask the Minister, when you look at this issue and examine what happened, are there policies that you need to implement right away within the Sahtu Health Board in terms of our health centres and handling our medical records when they’re being asked to be sent to another health centre or community for medical reasons, that there’s strong policies in place, relook at the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. I wanted to ask the Minister about the issue we heard on CBC this morning in regard to a breach of confidentiality of records that were sent to CBC by mistake from a health centre in Norman Wells. I wanted to ask the Minister to tell the people in this House and the people in the North and the Sahtu exactly what happened in regard to this matter of a breach of confidentiality of a person’s medical records.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I’d like to recognize Ms. Sarah Wright-Cardinal also, from the Aurora College, and thank her for the tour in the Sahtu.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Would the Minister explain to me what it would mean if this Legislative Assembly delayed the implementation of the new policy that she’s bringing forward? What would it mean to us, what would it mean to the people in the Northwest Territories?

Mr. Speaker, just a primary focus of my question is on the coverage of these 2,200 people who are not receiving it today as we talk right now in terms of the coverage that other members of the Northwest Territories do enjoy. Now I want to focus on the concerns I am hearing around the table in the House here and in Yellowknife here, that there is a huge number of local people that are saying that a number of issues that they are telling us to not go ahead with it or scrap it or delay it or consider it again. I want to ask the Minister in terms of this policy here in terms of the people that we...