Sandy Lee

Mr. Chairman, I have a motion I need to make on the bill that we’ve agreed to.

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. My apologies. I should have caught it at clause 16.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my right is Ms. Lisa Cardinal, director of policy, planning and evaluation of Health and Social Services. To my left is Mr. Mark Aitken, director of legislation division. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to introduce Bill 4, An Act to Amend the Child and Family Services Act. The proposed amendments to the act are technical housekeeping changes required to clarify provisions already established in the act. The amendments include:

ensuring the current confidentiality provisions apply to all persons who have access to child protection files, including casuals, clerical, and those who are not directly involved in child care matters, such as information technology services and custodial staff;

renaming the various ‘plan of care’ terminology, thereby...

I don’t disagree with that. I do think that having a dedicated nurse for a community would be helpful for the communities. Right now the Deh Cho authority, like many other authorities, have a high vacancy rate in nurses. They have somewhere up to 30 to 40 percent vacancies in nurses. Like all the other authorities, they look at the pool of nurses available and have to share them around the authorities so that everybody in that area gets the nursing service. But they are working on a proposal to enhance nursing coverage in small communities including Wrigley, as the Member has stated in this...

The Member knows that the Beaufort-Delta authority is in a deficit situation. There is no money for them to fund from within. Secondly, I’m not sure where the Member gets that we’re only spending $60,000 in Tsiigehtchic. Mr. Speaker, the GNWT spends a lot more money than $280,000 in Tsiigehtchic for health and social services. We have a full-time community health rep there; we have a full-time home support worker there; we have visiting nurses that go there for 89 days of the year; we have doctors’ services; we have a specialist service; as well, a social worker that goes there, Mr. Speaker...

Mr. Speaker, first of all, we should be mindful of the fact that all of our communities have a nursing service. The community of Wrigley does have a nursing service and other health care service there. I do understand that for a lot of communities, they would like to have a live-in service, but that’s not always possible everywhere.

I want to advise the Member that the department and Deh Cho Health and Social Services Authority are working on a plan to see how they could enhance health care service in small communities within Deh Cho. There are some other very small communities in Deh Cho...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we are working on a project to look at enhancing nursing services in small and remote communities. We believe the proposal we have could shed light on what we can do and do services in other communities like the Mackenzie Delta. It is something we are working on with the authority. I have always stated in this House, Mr Speaker, that we are looking to enhance our services in small communities like Tsiigehtchic, but the Member also has to understand that we, at the moment, block fund our regions and we work under a system where the authorities share the...

I have committed that in the past. We understand and we accept that the RCMP for Wrigley is based in Simpson and they have increased their visits to Wrigley and that’s the proposal we have for communities in Deh Cho and that’s what we continue to work on for the region in Beaufort-Delta. Thank you.