Sandy Lee

The Foundation for Change is a three-year plan. It goes from 2009-12. There is a lot of stuff in there that we are going to move as the money... It’s the changes we could make and supports and funding we can find. Specifically to the accountability framework with regard to the governance and more accountability we can build into the authorities, we are hoping to have those agreements finalized by the end of this fiscal year, not by March 2010, but March 2011 or before that. We are going to be reviewing our contribution agreements and relationship agreements, so we can build in more...

Mr. Chairman, this is a one-time multi-year funding that the federal government agreed to provide to all three territories. An agreement was reached I believe back in 2003 or 2004. The payments didn’t begin to flow until a year later, which is why it is expiring at the end of March. The agreement lasted from 2005 to 2010. It is a $150 million program over five years so it is about $30 million a year. The portions of money that Yukon, Nunavut and NWT get are different. Nunavut gets more money for medical travel than we do and Yukon gets less. There are some other portions to that. It is based...

Currently the arrangements are that each authority is responsible for receiving complaints and investigating them. I am in the process of developing a list of a person responsible for handling complaints within each authority and put some guidelines and standards to that process perhaps to make sure that people feel they have a place to go to when they have issues about the services they receive. That there’s something clearly set out, information about what they can raise issues on and how that will be followed up.

Stanton has a pretty well-established process in that regard, but not everybody...

Yes, please, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have the list of legislation that the Member is looking at, but in general I can tell you that the resources for doing legislation is so scarce, not just in the department but with the Justice lawyers, that we wouldn’t be doing anything unless we need to. Sometimes things come up and I can also tell you that those lists have been on the books for a long time. They are making their way up and a lot of work would have been done, not just in this Assembly but in previous Assemblies as well. So I think there’s a constant scrutiny to see what is a priority because...

Yes, I’d be happy to do that. I’ve been communicating with the Minister of DIAND on this issue, as well as the Premier, who had contacted the DIAND Minister on this issue. I would be happy to provide the Member with that correspondence. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This issue was brought up during our visit and I believe we’ve looked into this, but right now I can’t remember what the exact details were. Home care services are important to us and it depends on the needs of the people we need to serve, as well as the part of the training and support that home care workers need. So I will undertake to revisit that file again and see what we can do there. Thank you.

Tuktoyaktuk does have a community wellness worker as well as a mental health and addictions counsellor. As Member Jacobson as well as the community have told us, that they would like to see an enhanced aftercare program in Tuktoyaktuk, especially in light of the fact that they voted to go restricted. I don’t know about the program that the Member is asking. I have to look into that. But I think, as I said, IRC is working with us to use this money to do up pilot projects in Tuktoyaktuk. They want to concentrate on aftercare and family wellness. They are looking into doing family counselling and...

Mr. Chairman, we could provide the Member with that information, but understanding that those vacancies on any given profession like nurses or social workers change constantly. On average, the vacancies for nurses in the Territories is about 30 percent, so Beaufort-Delta will be somewhere near that as well, I would think. But we could get that information for the Member. Thank you.

The agreement is such that there is a set amount of money that they will give us for the medical and hospital services for our aboriginal people. That’s a big chunk of money: $21 million. So every year we do sign the agreement because we do need to have that revenue coming in while we are reviewing the clause to see how we could renegotiate that. There’s not a lot of room for negotiation. It’s a contract that was signed long ago. The terms are quite strict and unilateral in a certain sense.