Just under the wire, Mr. Speaker. Thank you so much. Mr. Speaker, as folks might be aware, last night 9-1-1 services were impacted, and the government put out a press release saying if you're unable to reach your local health clinic or hospital by phone, go in person for any urgent need. Mr. Speaker, that's pretty impossible if you're unable to move, if you're on your own, when every second counts. I have a constituent who works in medical dispatch and wrote me with his alarming concerns.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to know what redundancy plans the Minister of MACA is working on so that future service outages don't result in unsafe situations for residents. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Great Slave. Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would assume that the point they were trying to get across is that if you were looking for help, you could go anywhere that provides the help, like the emergency department, RCMP detachment, or the fire service in your communities to get the help that you need. You know, when the NorthwesTel takes out these lines for their modernization of equipment, it's kind of out of our hands so, you know, they're -- what could be put in place, something we could look into but at the present time, when they take out these services, it knocks down all of our communication. So that's part of the problem. So at this time, we could take -- you know, take that back and see if there's an option of providing some kind of service in these times where the NorthwesTel does do maintenance on their systems. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, will the Minister then make some plans to have his department investigate what other jurisdictions do to maintain this critical service even during a telecommunications outage. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Back in the day, pre-cell phones and phones and everything else, we used smoke signals. No, we would have to go back, honestly, and look and find out from the other agencies, like in Alberta, what they do and how they layer their systems in order to have backups in their systems. So I'll ask the department to see what other jurisdictional scans we can do to see how we can backup our systems when our main telecommunications system is out. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. Final supplementary. Member from Great Slave.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the Minister is trying to make some levity, but it is a serious situation. So will the Minister commit to work with the Minister of Finance to address this telecoms gap. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will commit to working with anybody to try to solve this problem. When, like I said, it's Northwestel is the one that does the network system, they're the ones that control the telecommunications in the Northwest Territories. Again, we'll look at options, we'll -- I'll ask the department to do a jurisdictional scan to see what they do for backup systems in other parts of the country. But, again, we can work with other departments in order to find out what a solution might be. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. Colleagues, our time is up for oral questions.
Colleagues, recognizing the time, we will have a brief break to give the interpreters an opportunity. Thank you.
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