Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I didn’t indicate that addictions was the responsibility, solely a personal responsibility. I’d indicated that addressing addictions was a personal responsibility and what we’re trying to do is to try to provide some supports, and mentioning the Nats’ejee K’eh would be one of those supports in addition to some of the community programs like on-the-land programs, also, in addition to some of the early findings of the forum of maybe addressing some parental issues, putting in programs to assist parents at the community level and so on.

So it wasn’t to take all the money...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We would like to have a few minutes to see if we have the information here with us.

Mr. Chairman, I think a fairly common thing has been that people sometimes end up with mental health issues as a result of addictions. Sometimes people with mental health end up with addictions. That’s why we see the two items fairly linked. We’re trying to give the forum the ability to, as we appointed them as experts in the community, that they are well known in the community and had good community knowledge, that they felt that removing the mental health from their forum would net better results and better consultation at the community level by using the term addictions and community...

Thank you. I will ask the deputy minister to provide a more detailed response to that question. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That budget is in the contribution to YK Health and Social Services. The overall contribution and the total amount is $175,000.

Thank you. We recognize that part of the issue in some of the authorities is the result of just not having the right budgeting for some. For some it’s the costs of doing business the way that each of the authorities do their business, bringing locums in from across the country. So as we move towards dealing with a governance issue at the health and social services authority and trying to change the way we manage our physician resources across the territory, trying to bring the physician resources to the Northwest Territories, we’re hoping to address these issues.

So I’ll just read some of the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We don’t have a lot of the detail here on the gaps in order to fill all the requirements that are needed and the work that’s needed by the department in order to meet the needs of the development of a specialized court. What we have and what we will work on – and, of course, that motion was passed today – is that we have some work being done with the development of a youth and detox program models as one of the pieces. We are looking at hiring some mental health specialists in the professional development and also in the quality assurance. Also, looking at some other...

Mr. Chair, the plan was to continue to work with the CEO, then the CEO continues to work with the health centres that may be impacted. Based on the actual impact on the health centres in as far as the number of health concerns or health issues that are brought to the health centres, or a number of social services type of issues that come to the forefront in her dealing with social workers within the communities and within her region, we will have that discussion with her again to ensure that, although we are having discussions with her, I think we were waiting for her to come with a case to...

The information I have is that it does address the recommendations and that we are working with the Coalition on Family Violence to address the recommendations in the original plan.

Mr. Chairman, the timeline for us responding to the forum’s report is we’re going to try to do a roll-up of their recommendations in April, and then during the May-June sitting of this Legislative Assembly, we are hoping to be able to present, and that’s again targeted to do it at that time to present the recommendations and how we see those recommendations fitting into our Mental Health and Addictions Action Plan and moving forward to address those issues that are identified by that forum.