Sandy Lee

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...

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. 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...

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.

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...

Yes.

I don’t have the information as to what happens to children after 18, but I could see if I could get that information. For the children who are under 18, there are currently 18 children in care outside of the Territories: two children, because they have a specialized medical condition; four children moved out to be with extended family; two moved south with their extended family; and ten children have moved to go with a formal foster family, because it was thought to be in the best interest of the children that they stay in the family they know for now. But in terms of the numbers, this is...

I don’t have that level of detailed information, but I’d be happy to get the information for the Member.

I would like to recognize staff and board members from the Yellowknife Association of Community Living and the NWT Council of Persons with Disabilities. First of all, the executive director of YACL, Jane Whyte. Then the board members of the NWT Council of Persons with Disabilities: Judy Sharp; Bill Burles; Don Gillis with his wife, Ann Gillis; and the staff who I believe were here earlier, Corine Nitsiza, Beth Lenardon, Linda Noseworthy, Heather Clarke and the executive director of NWT Council of Persons with Disabilities, Cecily Hewitt.

I agree with the Member that we need to do more work on that. I appreciate the work the Member did on that Plan of Care provision of the Act that we amended. I supported that as a member of the committee. Regrettably, we do not have as many Plan of Care committees set up as we would like. The department is working with any committee that acts interested in it, to give them workshops and to help them set them up. That is something we need to do a lot more work on, which I am planning on doing more rigorously as we move forward.