Sandy Lee

I could provide the Member with what we have in the department on that topic.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Minister responsible for Seniors, the issues that MLAs and our residents bring forward to my office pertain to various government departments and programs. I work with the relevant departments and their Minister to resolve some of the issues. I’m not familiar with the particular case that the Member brought up, but I’d be happy to look into the situation and see what we can do and what has been done. Thank you.

I don’t know if there is an administration fee. I know that Stanton provides this service for Sahtu, so I could undertake to do that, but I am thinking that his meaning is does Sahtu have to pay more to get it through Stanton, and clearly that is not the case. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m assuming that the Member is referring to the Midwifery Program, and the Foundation for Change speaks to coming up with a territorial-wide strategy by the end of next fiscal year. It will take some work and, as I said in committee, we will bring stakeholders and we will review this program. I was just talking about the importance of expanding this, talking about that I personally believe and that is the direction that I am giving to the department, is that we need to look at not just what’s going on right now, which is very heavily medical-based midwifery...

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. I don’t have all of the information for all of the communities in the Territories in front of me, but for Lutselk’e we provide $186,000 for Lutselk’e mental health and addictions. We also provide $23,000 for Lutselk’e cultural programs; $76,876 for Deninu K’ue First Nation to fund their addiction counsellor position in Fort Resolution, and in addition we provided $23,000 to Deninu K’ue First Nation for youth addiction initiatives. That’s just an example of the different programming funding that we provide to smaller communities.

I take the Member’s point that maybe we should look at...

Mr. Speaker, as we are all aware, we have 31 communities in the Northwest Territories. I think the communities like Inuvik or Fort Simpson, Hay River, Norman Wells, are good candidates for having midwifery services where mothers could be supported from surrounding communities. Obviously I don’t think we could do it in the smallest of communities where there might be two or three births. I believe originally the Midwifery Program was targeted for Hay River. The community chose not to take that on and that position started in Yellowknife.

So this is an important issue and it needs a comprehensive...

Mr. Speaker, the Member is making correlation of analysis on this data. I am not sure if it is a connection that experts who look at these things make, but I would be happy... I have no problem looking at what the Member is suggesting.

I could tell you that in Fort Smith, since we have had a Midwifery Program, there have been 200 births and about 54 percent of those births have been attended to by the midwives. Within the Territories, Fort Smith has the most comprehensive complement of midwives and even then we have about only 50 percent, or a little less than 50 percent births still happen at...