Sandy Lee

I take his comments. It is well taken. I hear him. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, as the Member is aware, the Deh Cho project is quite advanced and it is in charge of the Minister of Transportation. I believe the Minister of Transportation has answered some questions about cost of living implications. I beg to differ on some of the opinions the Member has on that. I think the Minister, and department, and the government has been willing to provide information that the Member is looking for. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, as I have stated in the committee when we were reviewing this plan, it is important for people to know that we are working on the contingency plan and we are working in partnership with all of the authorities. We believe this funding was supposed to be a transformational… It was to be aimed at changing the way we build up our service and strengthening primary care in the front line, like the midwifery and nurse practitioners, but we know that these programs have embedded into our entire service delivery. They are an essential part of our service delivery. So we are working, and...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, I would like to give my commitment to the Member again that I will continue to work with him and the Sahtu Health and Social Services Authority to continue to work on our communication. We understand that our health care staff, whether they be physicians or nurses or anything else, have their professional guidelines and rules and regulations that they follow in their practices. We can’t comment, really, on individual situations obviously, but I do appreciate that there is some room; there’s lots of room, actually, to work on for the providers as well as our...

Mr. Chairman, I can say just from the statement that the Member made, part of Foundation for...action plan is to do an inventory of facility needs to look at the inventory and the status and shapes of our health centres and health care facilities, also looking at long-term care needs of our residents in the Territories.

We know demographically we are going to need about 38 to 40 beds in the Territories over the next little while and it will be up to us to make a decision as to where that would go and I know that Sahtu is looking at that. So that’s where we are with the inventory, doing the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Just to jog the memory of everybody here, Mr. Speaker, the Strategic Initiatives committees were set up at the beginning of this Assembly in order that our government could work across the departments to advance the priorities that were set out by the 16th Assembly. All of the work that we have been doing in these committees -- and there were five committees set up: Building Our Future, Managing This Land, Reducing the Cost of Living, Maximizing Opportunities and Refocusing Government -- had been added to the budgets that we have considered and approved, both in O and M...

I am afraid I am not on the inside of Minister Flaherty or Minister Stockwell who is now the new Treasury chair. I can tell you that Nunavut government, Yukon government and this government have worked hard, methodically and substantively to get this program renewed. The proposal we have is asking for about $200 million because we want to build in the escalator. There has been a working group of assistant deputy ministers of health of all three governments. We have the Yukon, Nunavut and myself; Ministers over the last two years have had meetings with the Minister of Health. In the most recent...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my left is deputy minister of Health and Social Services, Paddy Meade; and to my right is director of finance, Mr. Derek Elkin.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Much of what the deputy minister said in terms of the work we are doing on the governance model and role clarity, that does deal with the thing that the MLA Krutko just brought up. We are working to strengthen accountability in service delivery and financial accountability plus I’m just saying this in my own language here, but it’s written in a more fancy way in the book... We are working for service accountability, financial accountability and coordination accountability.

Right now, the way our authorities are set up, they are quite independent. They get bulk funding...

Mr. Chairman, I remember looking at that very closely as a Regular Member too, so the minute I came into this office I reviewed that. Since then, my understanding of the contract is, we have to go back to the history of this, but I think the agreement was signed by the Minister at the time of 11th or 12th Assembly and it is a pretty clear cut, short agreement on how much the federal government is willing to pay for the doctor service and hospital service for our aboriginal people. There’s not a whole lot of negotiating clauses built into that. It is renewable every year, so it is either we don...