Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker and chairman of committee of the whole. First of all, after support from the Members of this House, that gave me honour of sitting on Cabinet, the Premier assigned me the responsibilities for Health and Social Services, Justice and as the lead Minister for Social Policy renewal. I am going to speak as generally as I can within the ten minutes on those three matters.
First in respect to my responsibilities as Minister of Health and Social Services. When I assumed that role, the focus of the department and on government, was on deficit reduction as a whole. The initial approach was to identify areas where expenditures could be reduced. Coupled with that was the fact that the department historically received, obtained and submitted supplementary funding requests to cover their escalating costs. We quickly realized this approach could not be successful in the long term. We recognized the need to identify what those cost drivers were and to develop some strategies that offset, reduced or caused to decrease those cost drivers.
The actions that we have taken over the past year, while dealing with the restrictive financial conditions, our changes, have been guided by the need to measure impact while at the same time trying to maintain a quality of care within our programs.
We worked with our boards and other agencies to reduce expenditures or reduce the rate of growth of expenditures and to develop alternative approaches that were less facility-intensive, more prevention focused that looked at repatriation of individuals from southern jurisdictions and supported home care throughout the north.
I want to speak briefly about strategic planning within the Department of Health and Social Services. It has caught the attention, as Mr. Henry said, of some members and some interest groups.
You have to recognize that the Department, I think, has undergone a strategic planning process over the past five or six years and have never gone to the end of that. We realized that for us to make informed investments that would result in a more appropriate system that would determine a healthier population, we needed to develop a long-range plan for the health and social services system to assist us and guide us in some of those changes. That is why we accelerated the strategic planning process.
One of the first tasks was to complete the amalgamation of health and social services. In so doing, we brought the service delivery to at least the regional level and, in some instances, the community level. I think what is important to note on this is the issue about empowerment of regional health and social services boards as again, it is an area that has brought questions from some organizations and from some Members of this House as we shifted the resources and delivery of programs and decision-making to regional boards, whether it be in the area of medical travel, home care, alcohol and drug funding, wellness funding or social services. The decisions that the boards have made have not always been popular. Members speak about empowerment and the support of empowerment, but they always ultimately question some of the decisions that boards make. We have to decide once and for all is giving the decision-making to the board appropriate or should it be retained outside of the region, outside of the communities and held in a central location?
Having said that, I think there are more Members that support empowerment whether it is at a regional level or a community level than those that oppose it. What we have to do as a ministry, what we have to continue to do now is to support some of the board actions, assist them in their development, set monitoring and evaluation standards that we have spoken about and try to assist them in improving the quality of their work by supporting some of the human resources that we provide to health and social services boards.
System planning within health and social services is under way that is going to provide a framework for service delivery whether it is at the regional, community or territorial level, that would include the appropriate staffing mix, appropriate infrastructures to support those programs. The departmental restructuring is almost complete, as well, in respect to providing structures for the department in two new territories and trying to allow a smooth transition from one operation to two.
Some of the priorities in the next year and a half leading up to 1999 is having departmental input into some of the formula funding discussions in trying to obtain more adequate federal funding for the first five to ten years of two new governments and planning for the completion of the major infrastructure needs in Inuvik, Baffin, Keewatin, Kitikmeot, Deh Cho and Fort Smith while at the same time with some of the spending that we have under control, projections being more accurate and some of the strategic reinvestments that we have to take in the next year in respect to children's programming, public health, supported living and mental health strategies.
Just briefly, I see I am running short on time with health, and I have not gone to Justice or the other things yet. So briefly, I will just speak on some of the partnerships, ECE, Health and Social Services and Healthy Children Initiative which started out an Early Intervention Strategy, and it made sense for more departments to work together particularly in trying to integrate some of the services at the community level through the health care professionals, teachers, school counsellors, daycare workers, social workers, et cetera.
The joint initiative of Health and Social Services and Justice in respect to community supervision and planning to implementing and enhancing those supervision initiatives through regional health and social services boards.
The Ministerial Council on Social Policy Renewal has indicated the Premier assigned me as the lead Minister. It started out as an effort between the provinces and territories basically in responding to federal withdrawal of funding for Health and Social Services. The counsel mandate is to focus on clarifying some of the roles and responsibilities between governments, developing principles to guide Social Policy Renewal and trying to coordinate the different segments of that.
In the area of Justice, again, the department that is focused on meeting budget targets with the exclusion of developing some long-range strategies, and hence, some of the strategic planning initiatives that is under way within the department, we recognize the need to reform the justice system. However, it is slower to initiate this in a status quo, more regulated type of system that we work under. But in the long run, we believe the resources can be more economically and effectively used in the community to deal with crime and preventative measures. We focus on the community-justice initiatives to make the justice system more relevant to the communities and individuals in those communities.
In the area of policing, there has been a lot of work undertaken in the community constable programs in collaboration with MACA and with the RCMP to increase the involvement, again at the local level.
In the area of Corrections, there is a plan to deal with growth pressures by shifting the emphasis from incarceration to alternative methods of dealing with offenders, but we still have to recognize that there is a need for facilities. There has been an emphasis on wilderness camps and contributions to establish wilderness camps and ongoing per diem funding to support their operations.
I guess basically, Mr. Speaker, in closing off, the Health and Social Services and Justice, as we all know, are difficult portfolios. Decisions have been made. Many have been controversial in that any decision we make, you cannot please everybody. The government and myself as Minister have tried to make those decisions as fairly and equitably as possible in trying to treat communities and constituencies on a level playing field. With that, Mr. Chairman, I will conclude my comments. Thank you.