Sandy Lee

Thank you. I want to make sure I answer the question and what I said was FMB wants to have and we do want to have some discipline on health care budgets. At the same time we understand that we need to have flexibility and we have asked the authorities to come up with the business case to change the spending to accommodate local needs. I don’t want to talk about individual authorities, but the authorities get block funding to deliver health care programs and there are situations where they have a budget for physicians, but they may not have a full spectrum of physicians. Actually, they use a...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The chair and the Members have asked that we revisit our budget to see what options we might be able to come up with, and I’m prepared to do that. I have to state, at the same time, that the department is under fiscal pressure, as is the entire government, and we need to work carefully and thoroughly to see how we make those decisions. But I’m certainly open to working with the standing committee to see what options might be available. Thank you.

Yes, Mr. Chairman, I am aware of that issue. It is at a preliminary discussion stage. The federal government has made it clear that they would not be signing something that would have that sort of adverse impact on our government, but I could tell the Member that this is not advanced to a stage where you wouldn’t even get to FPT. If it were to get anywhere near that, it would be at FPT level. This is just something that is floating around on a global level.

But something in Canada, we have a federation. We have a health care federation. Provincial and territorial governments have a lot to say...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is not part of the Drop the Pop program right now, but we are reviewing that within the plan, including that in the future. Thank you.

Our staff that organize medical travel arrangements from Yellowknife to Edmonton would use the most economical means of booking those flights, but as the Member is well aware, some of our medical travel is time sensitive and we can’t be going for the cheapest flights.

I just want to confirm again that, as far as I am aware, we use both First Air and Canadian North. They are both northern airlines. Canadian North introduced a morning flight for Monday mornings in September, and on February 3rd they announced that they will reinstitute morning flights from Yellowknife to Edmonton on Tuesday...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The grandfathering will be dropped as of April 1st. So far the transition is quite smooth. We don’t believe there will be a savings per se, it is more so about consistency and fairness in applying the policy across the board so that we don’t have this class of people that has been grandfathered in perpetuity, which I would think would add more complications. I am going to ask Paddy to give more detail on numbers, if she has them. Thanks.

Mr. Chairman, no, we do not have a debt reduction plan for each authority because we do not consider this debt as being an authority debt. We have been saying that for three years. We consider this as a system debt. We are making systematic changes through Foundation for Change. We believe that we need to make systematic changes to make sure that each authority has the right budget, that they do things without duplication, that they are a better transition of services and patients across the authorities.

Right now we have some authorities that are having a surplus and some that are in deficit...

I believe by and large we do a lot of that already. Healthy Choices Framework, the Strategic Initiatives committee money. There are a number of examples we could give the Member where Education, Culture and Employment and their schools, and MACA, and Health and Social Services work together, especially working with children in our communities. I know of many, many examples where our community health reps and health staff go to schools. As the Member knows, in Fort Resolution, for example, the school there is just a beautiful example of where the teachers and the health care professionals are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As far as I’m aware, we don’t have one airline that we use. We use all airlines available. Canadian North just instituted morning flights for four mornings out of the week. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The issues that the Member is mentioning here are a part of the review, so we expect to have the review done by the end of this fiscal year and to be able to bring forward to the standing committee for discussion with recommendations following that in April or May. Thank you.