Tom Beaulieu

When we discontinued funding to Nats'ejee K'eh, we had indicated to the individual governments, Aboriginal governments that approached us and asked us what we were going to do, we said at this point we had discontinued the funding and now we are working on developing something that’s going to work community by community, and we have promised them that sometime after the end of this fiscal year we would have things in place that would allow individual communities to access funding to run on-the-land programs.

Mr. Speaker, as I indicated in my response, we are going through the recruitment aspect of it. Also as important, if not more important, is the retention aspect of the job. We recognize that we have a high vacancy rate. I think we have a vacancy rate of 26 percent in social workers. I do believe that is the highest number of any particular profession in the health and social services system at this time. Therefore, I have actually met with all of the CEOs at the Joint Senior Management Committee. One of the priorities that I have given to them was to develop a recruitment and retention system...

The department in general, we have an Aboriginal community wellness division; we have money that’s being put into addictions from the House. We’ve got some additional funding to address some of the issues that we laid out in one of the two, either the action plan or the recommendations from the forum. We’re moving ahead in areas that we have been talking about for the last several months since we’ve got the forum’s recommendation. We intend to carry them out. I think we’re moving in that direction. It’s a difficult thing to answer what are you doing to carry out. We’re following the plan...

Thank you. I think we have to really look at the philosophy of on-the-land treatment. We’re asking Aboriginal governments to provide us with proposals on what they see as something that will work for on-the-land treatment for the people, whether they be elders, the youth or families. This is not going to be a program where the government is going to come in with a program and then determine how the program will be set up. On-the-land treatment is something that would be community driven. We’ve received proposals from counsellors in the Sahtu even, and they’re very good, but what we’re trying...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are many vacancies in the Health and Social Services department and health and social services authorities. Specific to the full-time mental health worker in Liard, I don’t have the information on exactly when that individual position would be filled, but we do know that it’s one of the positions we are having difficulties filling. We do have a system that we are trying to employ. The Member referred to Health and Social Services taking over the human resources section to fill the vacant positions. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re expecting that we would...

We would be coming forward through the regulatory process, the business planning process and presenting our full-blown costs for on-the-land treatment to the House. Thank you.

Thank you. I think what we would rather do, I suppose, is to get into a contract on the number of people who would be taking the treatment and then pay the rate for that treatment as opposed to agreeing to pay for the operating costs of the facility. So I think that is probably the way we would go, certain costs for a certain number of people that are in treatment. Thank you.

We spend slightly over $6 million in community counselling. A lot of the community counsellors are from the communities that they work in, so they may be involved. The other thing is certainly our involvement would be that we are a funder for the on-the-land treatment program. Where we can assist in other areas, the department is prepared to do that.

Thank you. That is my hope, but I don’t have the information here with me on the treatment options that we’re moving forward with at this time. But I do believe that we’re definitely looking at something with the Inuvialuit further north and we’ve had these discussions with the Gwich’in. So I’m hoping that something can come out of this this winter and I can certainly update the Member on that, if that is the case. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, if there was a better use for the building within government overall, I think, as a government we will make that decision to use that facility for something else like training or something that would be used outside of Health’s mandate. As I indicated, we need to have that discussion with the people from the reserve – it’s built on the reserve – and then take their advice on what we should be doing with that building. Thank you.