Sandy Lee

I’ve not been to Alaska, but I have had the occasion to look at the health care services available in the Yukon. I’ve also had the opportunity to go to Navajo. I have to say that I would compare our care to anybody in Canada. This is not about aboriginal care in our communities, I believe.

As we have already stated, this government spends $326 million. I think our aboriginal people are a power-base in the Territories. They sit on all of the authorities. They are the chairs of our authorities. They have a say on what gets done. This House is made up of aboriginal leaders. If you look at the H1N1...

This is one where we have a longstanding agreement with the federal government. I believe it was signed in early 2000, or somewhere around there. There’s a built-in escalator there at 2 percent. That’s the funding formula that’s being used.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t know if I can add anything more than what I have already said. We are involved. We are part of the responding process for the government through Environment and Natural Resources. Thank you.

Yes, I would be happy to do that and get back to the Member as soon as possible.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t think it’s accurate to say, and in fact I know it’s not true to say, that anybody in the Territory is not getting health care service. Tsiigehtchic does get health care service. They do get doctors’ visits, they do get nursing care, they have a community health rep. So I understand when the Member says that he would like to see more, but that’s not to say that there is no health care in Tsiigehtchic. We share doctors like everybody else does. There are no communities in the Territories other than Yellowknife and Inuvik that have resident doctors. Everybody is...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Is the Member, I don’t see the area that he is talking about on page 8-9... Oh. Could he be more specific?

Our response will be coordinated through the Minister for ENR. That is how, I believe, we will proceed. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member communicated this to me a couple of weeks ago, I believe. We are in the process of looking into that. Obviously, we don’t normally talk about individual medical situations here, but the Member did provide detailed information about the status of the situation and what the family is looking for. I’d like to just tell the Member that generally it is a practice for us to review a patient’s situation to see if the care being provided is acceptable or good, where we are doing it. If other options should be considered, we will be doing that. So I will confirm with...

Yes, Mr. Chairman, that is correct. That is what I said.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We expect that the TeleSpeech project will be available in every community, but it’s going in in a phased-in approach. I believe Sahtu is one of the first ones, because in our tour, we saw the TeleSpeech machines in all facilities. I believe the full implementation of that was delayed a little bit because we were concentrating on the H1N1 effort.

TeleSpeech will be used to give speech language therapy first of all to students who need them. We have some of those stations in schools and we work with the Department of Education, Culture and Employment on that. Also, I...