Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also look forward to Wednesday when we will get a chance to sit down with the Minister and get a briefing. I think that is very important. While I have had a chance to take a cursory glance at the report, we have not really been able to examine it closely yet. But one of the things I have been able to glean from the pages as I go through this, is that no report can be done in isolation.
To borrow a concept from my colleague, Mr. Roland, I think we get into trouble when we try to take a stove-pipe approach to these problems. Mr. Miltenberger alluded to the same thing. One of the things I gleaned from the information was that education is an underlying theme and a priority.
One of the things the report mentions is we have real problems in the area of recruitment and retention. We know we are battling a shortage of professionals in the health care field in the south. Our prospects for recruiting people from the south are not great in the short-term future. I think we realize one of the things we have to be focused on is training Northerners.
We have a great program at Aurora College that is training nurses. I think 39 or 40 nurses have graduated in the last three or four years. This is a great step. But when we look at the numbers that we need across the Territories, we have some 400 nurses who are currently employed. My numbers might not be correct, Mr. Chairman. Roughly, we are currently able to train about 10 percent of the work force.
We also see that of the 39 nurses we have been able to train, most of them are currently working in Yellowknife. It has to be this department's priority and focus to be able to not only train Northerners, but to get Northerners back to the communities where they can work with the people and make a difference.
FAS and FAE is a huge concern, and I think education plays a major role here. People have to understand the implications of the choices they make. We have to promote healthy lifestyles. Education will play a large role in how successful we are in doing this. I think now we need that, with the discussions on teacher to pupil ratio and problems in the classroom, special needs is a huge issue. We are going to find we will have to mainstream special needs students and provide special or extra help to students who are at what we would have previously considered a normal level. That is how large this problem has become. I think it is epidemic. This is something we are going to have to work on. Education is the key here.
Mrs. Groenewegen alluded to the fact that we cannot just pour money down a black hole. We have to do something at the front end. We can throw a lot of dollars at this problem, and it will not go away. Education has to be a real priority.
I mentioned healthy life choices. This is something we really have to promote. Essentially, we all know we are smoking, drinking and gambling ourselves to death, furthermore to veritable bankruptcy. We are spending a huge portion of every dollar on the social envelope, and health problems are the majority of the spending. Citizens have to be aware of this and realize that we are in a catch 22 situation.
The key has to be education. If we can educate our people and make them realize they have to make decisions that will impact their own health, we will be a lot further down the road. I would like to thank the Minister for her comments today. I look forward to working with her in the Social Programs Committee and getting briefings from her. This is a critical and very important piece of work we have here and I look forward to looking into it further. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.