Sandy Lee

These are net numbers. I am going to ask Mr. Elkin to do the math for me.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. I have the same copy as the Members do, so I can answer that. I will undertake to get that information for you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Monfwi that Bill 10, An Act to Amend the Pharmacy Act, be read for the second time.

Mr. Speaker, this bill amends the Pharmacy Act to allow pharmacists to prescribe a limited quantity of certain drugs for the continued care of a patient. Pharmacists are required to notify the initial prescribing practitioner of the continued-care prescriptions.

My information is that we do not know of any NPs trained in the North who have left. I got a motion from one of our Members, who knows there might have been one. I will undertake to look into that further and get back to the Member.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate that this is an issue where the Member has concerns, not specifically with Health and Social Services alone but government-wide. I believe the answer has been given in that regard, in that a decision was made to notify the employees of their potential impacted status. Then the choices are given to the employees to see whether they want to pursue other options. I do understand there are affected employees who have chosen not to do that. That’s their option as well.

As the Member is aware, the principle behind it and the good intention behind it was so that instead of...

We estimate that this year’s expenditure will be at about $41 million, and the expenditures we could claim as per the agreement will be about $25.6 million, which gives us a gap of about $15 million a year.

Mr. Speaker, I want to say, for the record, that I appreciated the opportunity to see first-hand and hear first-hand the challenges that the residents in small communities have with respect to dental care. For our aboriginal people it is covered by the NIHB services, but we have not been able to obtain service providers. There are lots of dentists and dental clinics in the North who have not taken up the opportunity to bid on this contract, in particular for the Deh Cho region. They had a challenge in obtaining a contract, and I believe only in the last month were they able to find a dentist...

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is the third month of ’08–09. We are, as the deputy minister indicated earlier, engaged in restructuring of the department, where the health side of the mandate is more specifically laid out. This is probably my layperson’s explanation of that. I could have the deputy minister explain more of that.

We do have the remaining nine months to finish reorganizing the department and to make sure we do more in-depth research into how to re-profile and realign the positions so we minimize the impact on the programs and services.

I could ask the deputy minister for more...

I’ll get that for the Member.