Sandy Lee

Yes, of course we were.

Mr. Speaker, as the Member knows, the chief has given us a proposal. They have very different ideas, not different ideas but a new idea of making this position work for them. He has asked us to work together jointly in rewriting the job description and hiring. Those are the ideas that I am interested in working with the chief. We also met with a gentleman who is very interested in taking on this work for the community, who is from the community and who lives there.

Mr. Speaker, the timeline is the spring. I would like to, I don’t know... What is spring in the Northwest Territories? March or...

Of course not. What we are talking about is Stanton Territorial Health Authority being a $100 million organization, give or take a few. Sahtu is a $10 million organization. They have been around for five or six years. So it is authorities working together and they do the buying activities with Stanton. So if you are going out to order, I don’t know, birthing beds, it is better if Sahtu just buys one and if, say, Stanton bought ten and one of them is for Sahtu, they don’t have to go through the whole new tendering and contract procedure. But I don’t think Stanton is charging extra money to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is no increase in our budget for I don’t think any program. Any of the new initiatives are very specific areas in the strategic investment community initiatives and that was outlined in our opening statement. This is a very status quo budget and that was made very clear by the Minister of Finance when he brought down the budget on day two of the session. But we do understand that delivering the diabetes program to our people is part of our core programming and we do that through our regional offices with the assistance from the knowledge that headquarters can...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It would be part of health promotion.

To get more assistance or a single-window approach is something that we would have to approach the federal government on because it is their program. But in the short term and for our own purpose, I do understand what the Member is saying and I think that what I could do is see if we could make the names or the number of Non-Insured Health Benefits funded people in Inuvik available so that people could call there. I do believe that our nurses and our health care staff in our regional offices do help people wade through that. So in the website, when we give the website page, it is usually to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the Member’s question. As he stated, we did visit the community. We had a good discussion with the chief and we also met in my office as a follow-up visit.

Mr. Speaker, we have responded to Chief Arthur Tobac on his proposal. We are interested in discussing with the community his proposal. Our staff has been directed to engage in a dialogue. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I am not aware of a request that he has made that we haven’t responded to on this topic. I know he brought it up about Beaufort-Delta and we followed up in writing. I could tell you, Mr. Chairman, that the purchasing of medical equipment has been done through public tender. There are some standardized, mostly public tender or standing offer agreements in one case, but mostly all public tender. It follows the guidelines. All the northern businesses are allowed to bid on them. There are some standards that the authorities require and a lot of purchasing is done through Stanton...

Mr. Chairman, I am going to ask the deputy minister to give more details on that. Thank you.

I didn’t hear a question there. I take the Member’s comment and I don’t believe we disagree with that finding and suggestion made in the CFSA report.