Thank you for the question. I am very familiar with long-term care centres. My nana has been living in one now for 12 years, and she is lucky. She has a big family in Hay River, and she gets visits all of the time, every day. It is strange if someone doesn't visit her during the day, but there are people in that same facility from a few communities away, and they don't get any visitors. You can tell that that weighs on them. It is a big impact on your quality of life.
As to building a long-term care centre in those communities, I am not sure what the requirements are. I know that they always say you need a doctor; you need a doctor present. I am not sure if that is the case, but one thing that we can do is fill that gap between people living on their own and people entering long-term care. That includes things like homecare.
If we have much more homecare in the communities, you could have years, five or 10 years more, in your own home. If we have better programs in terms of housing, people can get ramps in their homes. In Hay River, there was a couple, I think, 92- and 93-years-old, where Housing said, "No, you can't get a ramp to your house." We are trying to keep people in their own homes, we are trying to keep people out of long-term care, and we are making it difficult for ourselves.
Those are the kinds of things that need to happen. A commitment to build three long-term care centres, obviously, I can't do that, but I am sympathetic to this, and I realize that there is value beyond the dollar value in keeping people in their own homes. There's the cultural value. It is not just the elders who are missing their families; it is the family who don't get to see their elders, talk to them, learn from them. This is an issue, and it is one of those big issues facing the territory that we don't seem to have a plan for, other than, as one of my colleagues from the last Assembly said, "seniors warehousing units," which are essentially the big long-term care centres.
I look forward to working with everyone. I look forward to discussing this at the priority-setting meetings and seeing what kind of solution we come to. Thank you.