Norman Yakeleya

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At one time the Grollier Hall Healing Society was involved in the court process up in Inuvik, and the Grollier Hall Healing Society developed training modules, residential school treatment program models, care givers survivors, community survivors.

Can the Minister go back in history and see if these models can be used today? These were trailblazers in terms of helping the survivors in the communities. Can the Minister look and say, yes, the wheel has been invented, we can use this? Can he get a hold of those models and look for…

I read a report on the impact of residential schools and other root causes for poor mental health in Aboriginal people and students who attended residential schools and the devastating effects is has on mental health. We have reports on the residential school survivors that cannot access treatment programs right now in the Sahtu region, people who are being denied. We cannot close their files because they cannot fulfill a treatment program under the mental health Minister’s Forum on Addictions. We’re failing terribly at the community level.

How many mental health workers are right now working...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the Minister’s Forum on Addictions, in the recommendations…There are over 60 recommendations, 67 to be exact, the recommendations are to help with the interagency of our small communities.

I want to ask the Minister, can he commit to give direction to the health workers under his authority to work with the other agencies, such as the police, the counsellors, to look at how they deal with mental health patients in the community so that they do not fall through the cracks when they need help from a small community perspective?

That’s certainly good news on this side of the House here. I look forward to the Minister’s follow-up.

Lately I’ve been trying to address the problems experienced by the residential school survivors who have been convicted of a violent or sexual crime and who have been turned away from addictions treatment programs. These men are falling between the cracks.

As an alternative, will the Minister commit to funding intensive individual therapy sessions for these men, or looking at a mobile treatment program?

We have maybe seven, eight months left in the term of this government. Are there some concrete plans from this government, this department, to look at, maybe in the 18th, that maybe Transportation will be moving or consider moving to the Sahtu so that the Sahtu can have their own superintendent and their own regional office that would be deemed as an independent office in our region?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There’s a quote, and I talked about it earlier in my Member’s statement. The quote says, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” I want to ask the Minister of Transportation in regards to this type of issue I was talking about. It’s just a simple one, a small one and I’ve been asking for a number of years, especially at this time of the year that…

I want to ask the Minister, are there any types of plans within the Department, the government, to look at decentralizing the transportation office into the Sahtu?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I do want to say to the Minister that we certainly look forward to the long-term care facility in the Sahtu. It’s going to be located in Norman Wells and also the new health care centre. We’ll continue to look forward to the implementation more so that the staff who are going to be filling those positions working with Education, Culture and Employment and Aurora College to get the message out there that there are opportunities for people in the Sahtu region and the North with regard to staffing that facility. There are spinoffs to having a facility such as a long-term...

With Transportation we also get our regional office for the airports. It’s out of the Inuvik region. I’m saying Transportation has that office up there.

Is the Minister also looking at that section of the department?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Freedom. Such a powerful word. People fight for it, children yearn for it, companies aspire to it and governments protect it at all costs. As individuals, we cherish it. Sahtu region wants its freedom, wants its independence. We have tasted it. We have known what it is like to have departments slowly coming into the regions ourselves to make our own decisions based on the realities of the Sahtu lifestyle.

The time has come for the other regions to let go of their shackles on the Sahtu and allow it to make its own decisions.

For example, the Department of Transportation...

Certainly, Mr. Speaker. There are also the Aboriginal First Nations bands that are in negotiations, but certainly under the federal jurisdictions they certainly get more than $20,000 a year to operate their core funding. I’m trying to see where the equalization of the Metis people to have the same type of treatment by the federal government while our government is doing the best it can with the amount of money that we have.

Where is this Cabinet in regard to seeing what the federal Minister has to say about raising the level of equalization to the Metis people as in the Constitution? Is there a...