Tom Beaulieu

Just off the top of my head, a lot of the prevention work will reduce medical travel. Electronic medical records will reduce medical travel. E-health also will reduce medical travel. The TSN, I think we have a different name for that now, Territorial Support Network, where there’s a doctor on call who is able to assist people in remote communities through the telehealth system. Those items are intended to reduce the cost of medical travel. Otherwise we’re back to, without THSSI funding, the increase in the Canada Health Transfer will probably end up filling the gaps in 2014-2015.

Along those lines, we have recently hired an official languages manager. That was with the intention of updating our services on the official languages. We are also running a medical terminology specific to cancer, in Fort Good Hope as a pilot. Once the workshop is able to come back to us with terminology that we should be using to describe some of the things related to cancer, we will see the success of that type of workshop and then expand on that.

As a Minister of Health, I’m trying to develop things today that will have a savings in the future. I recognize that the Minister of Finance has done the tour on the ways that they can put the savings into the budget and, as the Member indicates, a lot of them are related to Health as a department, and consulting with my senior managers and finding out how do we think that we can meet some of the objectives of the people in the Territories and that’s what we’re doing. We’re putting together things that we think are huge cost drivers in the system and we’re trying to curb that now so that they...

Thank you. We’re expecting the health centre to be open early in the new fiscal year, early.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Right now some of the positions at health centres and hospitals have built into their jobs that they would be able to do interpreting or translating. I’m not sure what the correct term is. I don’t have the information here. I would rather say to fully draw out what we plan on doing for translation or interpretive services at the hospitals.

Thank you. Most of it is common sense. The reduction in medical travel will happen, yes, if you had midwives in Yellowknife. However, right now people are coming to Yellowknife to have babies. People are coming to Inuvik to have babies. That’s not going to change. Whether the midwives are in Inuvik or the midwives are in Yellowknife, that’s not changing. The people are still coming here. There’s still medical travel to come here. So that’s the territorial program, same with Inuvik.

Now in Fort Smith, about half of the people that are having babies in Fort Smith are still coming to Yellowknife...

Thank you. The actual discussions are between Municipal and Community Affairs, Public Works and ourselves with the federal government.

Thank you, Madam Chair. There are several reports. Some we may possibly be able to share. We may be able to share all the reports but this is proprietary. Some of the reports may be proprietary information. We’ll share what we can with committee.

I am familiar with the report, I don’t have all the details of the report, but I do have enough details in the report to move forward in the direction that the department is taking it. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are very close to having the land tenure sorted out with ANSI and we’re very close. They didn’t want to proceed on dealing with the land tenure issue until the project was substantially complete. So this is what we’ve done. We’ve completed the facility as of August 2012, this past August the unit was considered to be final and, therefore, we’ve moved with the Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada in the process of finalizing land tenure and we are at the very final stage where we’re expecting to have that resolved very soon. I can’t give the exact date...