Sandy Lee

As the Minister of ENR indicated, this is quite new still, new in the process. It is massive, it is substantive, it needs a lot of work. I want to state that we are, our department is involved at the deputy minister level to provide the input and whatever else is needed. Included in that would be our expertise on the delivery of health care and social services, which is obviously a part of the recommendations. So without going into the details of that, because ENR is coordinating it, I think we could say that the department is involved in all aspects of the response through ENR. The Minister...

Broadly speaking, we will first look at what services we have within the Territories, because we do want to keep our residents in the Territories as much as possible. We do know that we have at least a couple dozen patients from the territories in various jurisdictions all across Canada. I’m not aware of anybody that we have sent to the States. The decision on where to send the person will depend on what comparable services are available and we would try to find care for the patient closest to home as much as possible. So we would first look at southern jurisdictions before we would consider...

That is the deputy minister’s specialty area, so I would ask her to answer that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just speaking from a layperson perspective, these TeleSpeech, telehealth machines are big, nice, flat-screen TVs that could be connected to anywhere there is a service provider on the other side. Telehealth was the initial part of that and TeleSpeech is a program that’s offered through telehealth. This is something that would expand as we get more people and more connection from point A to point B. Health care professionals have spoken to me about the possibility of diagnosing through telehealth. Somebody could sit in Deline and talk to a radiologist or neurosurgeon...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources indicated, ENR is the lead department, but there are deputy ministers across departments working to provide the input into the response. At the department level in Health and Social Services, the deputy minister is involved in the response. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, as I have stated, at any time the committee wants to meet with us, we are available. We are ready to give the Member information. I will say it again, that all of the budget items that have gone, that we have talked about in this committee are in our budget to consider. If you would like that identified, we would be happy to do that. Any other documents that the Member wants, I will provide that to him. Thank you.

I think it is important for us to know that this is contingent on the federal budget. We do not prejudge what the federal government is going to do. I would like the federal government to extend this program. We do not want to relieve the federal government of coming up with this by us coming up with plans. We understand that we need to work on a contingency plan. This is why we don’t have it in the budget, but we feel we made a good case to the federal government and Premier Fentie had a private meeting with Mr. Flaherty. The Nunavut government has been pushing this hard. If anything, as...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask Mr. Elkin to provide the details. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I take the Member’s point that part of this paper is just to describe the function of the directorate which does facilities planning. I understand that there is quite a need for long-term care facilities and some other renovations for facilities in health care centres, and that is something that we will be discussing further with the Members and will be looking at community needs to see where to locate this as we move forward in the capital planning process because it is, as you understand... We need to establish the need, we need to get planning money and then work through our capital budget...

Mr. Speaker, I’d be happy to give the Member a list of them, because we have already approved some of them in our capital project last year, and we are into year two and three of those projects. Those are investments in winter roads in the Sahtu area, extending the runway at some of the airports in the Sahtu and other communities. I don’t want to miss out any other communities. We have put investments into the NWT Housing Corporation. We have made investments into income support and power subsidy programs. The money that Minister Miltenberger talked about investing in the Arctic Energy...