Tom Beaulieu

The intent of the shelter was to provide a warm place for people to go have coffee, socialize and so on. There is also the availability in there of some counselling pertaining to possible housing, employment and so on. The John Howard Society is actually the organization that works with the people in the day shelter in order to provide that service.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Health and Social Services has done an evaluation on the day shelter and at this time is reviewing the possibility of extending the funding through 2012-2013. The City of Yellowknife has also committed to extending their funding. Unfortunately the third funder on the project, BHP, will not be extending funding for this particular project but spending it elsewhere.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to speak about the state of the health and social service system in the Northwest Territories. We need to take decisive action to ensure that we can continue to deliver high-quality services to our residents into the future.

Sustainability of the health care system is a national issue and one that is of concern to Canadians across the country. Every health system in Canada is affected by rising costs, shortages of health professionals and the health needs of an aging population.

But in the North we face additional challenges, including the heavy use of...

This will be part of the repackaging of the way we are doing business. Communities that have success in programs and then have the program cut off after one year is not something that we want to continue. If communities have success with good programs in the schools or in the communities that are helping with prevention and are doing good upstream work for the Department of Health and for the people in the North, we are going to continue to fund those. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ve had discussions with the department at the deputy minister level, and I’ve talked to the CEOs of the health authorities in one short lunch meeting and have advised them that this is the direction that I’m hoping to take the department more into prevention. Thank you.

Like I indicated, running through the local health authorities across the North – and we have all the communities in one of the health authorities across the North – and right now the Diabetes Pilot Program and management of chronic diseases, the outcome to hopefully have better long-term results in diabetes prevention is being piloted in Norman Wells, Yellowknife and Behchoko.

The Department of Health and Social Services supports different alternatives to getting people to on-the-land activities. We have made $50,000 a year available to all of the communities if they want to do some on-the-land activities. It’s been a request from the communities and I’ve asked the Department of Health and Social Services to look at the possibility of developing on-the-land treatment programs across the North. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The GNWT has not looked at the current inventory for the possibility of using our inventory for treatment facilities. However, I think I should clarify that the intention, I think, is that we would look at what we have in place now for health and social services for treatment as opposed to building new infrastructure. So the idea of looking at current infrastructure was more or less looking at what infrastructure we had on the ground now as opposed to building something new. Thank you.

The entire department is trying to get more into prevention and when we put out reports and it’s necessary to indicate that the cause of this cancer is this or the human behaviour here is causing this type of cancer, then that can be something that we are working on. Whether or not the causes of each of the types of cancer are going to be specifically indicated in the cancer report that we’re going to be bringing out in 2012, I haven’t seen the report so I don’t know if that information will be there. But, yes, we are trying to get the message out. That’s the idea, is to get the message out to...

In Fort Good Hope between 2001 and 2009 there’s been 19 cases of diagnosis with cancer and there are 980 cases of cancer diagnosis across the NWT.

I’m not saying we don’t want to do this in Fort Good Hope; all I’m saying is it would be good for the department and it would be feasible for the department to develop a strategy that addresses the issue right across the Territories and not specific to one community.