Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask 1,000 questions on this department and especially in regard to health and social services, the Tl'oondih Healing Camp and child advocacy. Those questions have not changed my mind that something has to be done to the system to improve it versus making the notion that when we establish regional health boards now our problems are solved. All we have done is moved the control from one sector of the government to a newly formed sector. Yet the people in the communities still do not see changes they were hoping to see from anything they want in the way of developing drug and alcohol programs to how their medical service is going to be improved or the whole question about vacancies within the health system. In regard to my riding, the last time I checked there were three vacancies in Aklavik and two in McPherson. McPherson serves the Arctic Bay riding. At any one time there is only one nurse on call and she has to serve two communities. This has to be seriously looked at in regard to the quality of health care that we are presently delivering to the people in the communities.

There is the whole notion of devolving powers to the regional health boards that they were going to be closer to the communities. I will use an example, the Tl'oondih Healing Society, who has put forth four proposals to the Inuvik Regional Health Board looking for different funding to deliver alcohol and drug programs in the community of Fort McPherson. It has received only one reply to the latest proposal they put in just last week. I wonder if that is the case because they have a surplus in the regional health board's budget. A motion was passed in this House in which I received support from my colleagues and committee of the whole to recognize the Tl'oondih Healing Program and to direct the Minister to work to find sources of funding so the program could follow through. Very little has happened in that way to ensure that there are funds to carry on such a program.

The other area that I basically have concerns about is the whole area of community wellness and ensuring healthy communities. Because of the funding is presently being distributed to run alcohol and drug programs in the communities, the mental health workers to whom those funds have been distributed are so limited in carrying out that job in the communities that it is hard to even attract people to work within those different sectors because of the limited resources they have and the demands on them.

The other area I mentioned was Child Advocacy in regard to the children in our society, especially the ones who are under the care of this government, either being incarcerated in youth facilities or being put into group homes or what not. There has to be some system in place to ensure that children have an avenue to raise their grievances. I attended a conference in Winnipeg last year in which there were child advocacy groups right across the country. They have done a lot of good things. We hear the Liberal government stating that their main platform is children and youth. When it comes to this government, when you talk about child advocacy groups or things that could improve the system, working with other organizations across Canada who have developed the programs where they have legislation in the different provinces and who are able to have some clout and teeth in regard to making decisions in the way children are being treated when they are in custody of the government, when they are being transferred between correction facilities and young offender facilities or even in regard to the care they have been put in through foster care or whatever; there has to be an avenue there that they do have a group or agency where they can raise these grievances, so they are heard. We cannot continue to institutionalize our children to basically become another statistic on the wall of how many children we have in facilities or how many children have been taken away or how many are becoming street children. We see that in Yellowknife and other areas where you see a lot of runaways.

We have to look at what we have done over the last three years and see exactly if it is really working meeting the expectations that we all had when we put this new way of delivering health care to the people in the communities in the region. Is it working? Just like anything else, it is a process of learning and we have to continue to improve things to make them better. In the case of health care, what we have heard from the medical association from different doctors that there is a real crisis with regard to the health system in the north. There are vacancies in different areas of the infrastructure and in the whole area of health care delivery in general. We have basically taken the system which used to be one organization, split it up into four or five different categories and expected the same thing. We have to look at the whole area of community wellness and community health care in light of statistics in regard to events we have heard from the RCMP saying that they realize the cost to this government not only in the health costs but in the social costs in regard to justice is skyrocketing because of there are no programs for rehabilitation not only for the inmate himself but also to the people affected in the communities.

There has to be a mechanism that we can deal with these problems at home, in the communities and not to allow these problems to be resolved by just putting people in institutions. We have to find a way to find more funds and resources to be able to improve program delivery and services in the smaller communities. We say we are empowering communities by allowing them to deliver Community Wellness Programs and other programs but with the amount of resources they have and the limited human resources which they need to adequately do their job, it is not there. We have to seriously look at what has been done and exactly where we are trying to go. We have to take note that there are other factors we have to consider, such as the increase in birth rates, high employment rates we have in our smaller communities and the cultural differences people have from different cultural ethnic groups which are in the Northwest Territories.

The question I have asked the Minister over the last couple of years I ask sincerely because something has to be done to improve the communities I represent. Regarding a lot of these questions that I ask, no effort whatsoever was taken by your department to even try and consider some of these ideas. I will continue to ask questions, raise concerns, pass motions and nay this and nay that, but that is what I will have to do. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.