Thank you, Mr. Chair. Long-term care is an issue. Taking care of our elders has been an issue. My degree was over 20 years ago, and when I went down south for my social work degree, they were telling us at that time, over 20 years ago, geriatrics is the way to go. Our population is aging, and we need to start taking care of them. Twenty-some years later, we are still in this situation where we are not doing it appropriately.

I stated in my speech, and people that know me know, that I am brutally honest sometimes, and the reality is that I would love to be able to promise and say that, in every small community, we will have long-term care beds in this Assembly, but that would not be a reality. I apologize for that, for not being able to stand up here and lie. No, I am not apologizing; I am just being realistic.

We have shortages of healthcare staff in every region, so we need to look at boosting up our staffing at the moment, what we have, before we can even expand and move any further with that. I said in my speech that we need a stronger recruitment and retention strategy to deal with that.

The other thing that I heard in the Member's comment was also working in partnership. I have to say, in that region, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation is really progressive in working towards actually training their people in stuff. I think that there are options. We are moving into the polytech university, hopefully. We will be looking at training our own northern people, and I think that, if we work in partnerships with our Indigenous governments, we will actually be a lot more productive and we will be more successful. To train a nurse, you're looking at at least four or six years, depending on the specialization, maybe longer. We don't have that time. We need to work in partnerships together to do that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.