Tom Beaulieu

That’s a very difficult question. Success is largely measured by the individual themself who is attending treatment. Sometimes the counsellors and individuals determine success by the individual attending treatment. Sometimes they determine success by the individual finishing treatment and sometimes they determine success by the length of time the individual stays clean and sober after treatment. There’s no specific time. Some people say they have reached success if they have been sober six months, some is a year and some don’t ever believe they will ever reach success because they will never...

Mr. Speaker, until the Department of Health officially gives up the asset, it would remain with us. The thought is that we do that. Public Works has always maintained the building, so that’s continuing. This is a government asset sitting on reserve land, but we will continue to use the building. Public Works will continue to maintain the building. At some point down the road, if Health has no use for that building, it will be put back in the government inventory for other uses. Thank you.

Treating people in southern institutions is not a new thing. Treating people in southern institutions is not something that happened because Nats’ejee K’eh shut down. This is something that was ongoing. Individuals have come to us and have gone for treatment while Nats’ejee K’eh was still operating, have gone for treatment in the South. How the department selected this is after working with the various treatment centres down south, they looked at the places they felt would best suit our needs for the people of the Northwest Territories and had signed contracts at four treatment facilities down...

Actually, we were spending $2.2 million on the treatment centre, but we have $6 million on community counselling and we have in and around $12 million coming from the federal government in the Wellness Fund. So that’s money that’s going into the wellness of people. So it’s actually not one-tenth or 20 percent of what we’re spending on fires, it’s more than that. Thank you.

On average, long-term care is about $100,000 per year per senior, so that was why. I just did the math, so 10 seniors would be $1 million for one year.

Part of any treatment program, whether it be residential treatment, on-the-land treatment, mobile treatment, in order to have any treatment programs have success, we have to have an after-care program. That is one of the other recommendations that were made in the Minister’s Forum and also we recognized that just by talking to the community counsellors. An after-care program is very important and how we develop an after-care program, depending on the size of the community, will determine its success. Thank you.

Again, success rate is something that’s very difficult to identify. I don’t have the information on the number of people who went out for crack cocaine addiction, came back and stayed clean. So I’m assuming that would be the success, because crack, unlike alcohol, is once you’re back into it, you’re back into it and you are no longer successful. So first we determine what success is and then we start looking at the different numbers. Thank you.

Senior safety, for me, is something that is sort of like an emerging issue. That may sound like an unusual response, but when you watch things at a national level, you’re starting to see the very beginnings of what the various provinces are doing to develop a system that tries to keep the seniors safe. Simple things like putting in peepholes, grab bars, alarms and those types of things is what the jurisdictions are working on. We, as the Department of Health and Social Services, in my responsibility for seniors, are looking at those types of things with our other national partners.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A mobile treatment was one of the recommendations of the Minister’s Forum. We think that mobile treatment is certainly a possibility. Mobile treatment has been tried in other jurisdictions. I believe that mobile treatment has also been tried in the Northwest Territories in the past. So far what we’ve done is we’ve recognized that mobile treatment is something that is possible. We are developing a program around what mobile treatment could look like. We’ve talked to Poundmaker’s Lodge, which is a healing lodge in Edmonton, and found out if they have had individuals...

Thank you. No, we’re not doing it chronologically. What we’re doing is we’re trying to address what we consider to be top priorities. The recommendations to debrief the Minister’s Forum, we have talked about putting a group of people together. That group of individuals may actually have met, but I’m not 100 percent sure, so I wouldn’t say that here in the House. But we’ve talked with individuals that could work on debriefing the Minister’s Forum, so we’re approaching this. We’re not going to do it chronologically, for sure, I can assure the Member of that, but we are trying to get through all...