Thank you, Mr. Roland. With that, we will take a short break and come back and consider Bill 19.

-- Break

I will call the committee back to order. Would the Minister like to call in any witnesses? Minister Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, I would like to bring witnesses.

Does the committee agree that the Minister brings in her witnesses? Sergeant-at-Arms, could you escort the witnesses in?

Madam Minister, could you introduce your witnesses for the record?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, today I have Mrs. Penny Ballantyne, deputy minister responsible for Health and Social Services and Warren St. Germaine, the director of finance and management services. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Minister. We are on general comments. Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, yesterday I had been asking the Minister about the allocation of child welfare workers, the increase. The Minister had said she did not have the information in front of her that she had shared with the committee earlier. Just for the record, I was wondering if she has had a chance to get that information and if she could share the expected allocation with us now.

Thank you, Mr. Dent. Madam Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, in consultation with the health boards, the allocation for the ten social workers, which is a part of the $1.2 million investment in the response to the Child Welfare League review is ten workers; three in Yellowknife, one in Fort Smith, two in the Deh Cho, two in Inuvik, one in the Dogrib region, and one in Hay River. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Minister. Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Minister providing that information. Also for the record, could I get a confirmation that she and the department have agreed to re-examine the funding allocation to Yellowknife Health and Social Services to see whether or not the department can find it within their budget to maintain what was provided as one-time funding, as base funding for the two positions that have already been provided and the support worker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Dent. Madam Minister.

Yes, we could re-evaluate and re-examine the situation with Yellowknife again. We cannot make that commitment right now, but we will commit to look at it again. I would also like to say that this response to the Child Welfare League review was intended to be a phased-in approach. There are issues of constraint which we do face. One of them, of course, is as always financial.

Another is the ability to integrate the workers into our system. The other is the desire to find Northerners who are interested in these positions. We will be advertising and putting a priority on hiring Northerners to fill these positions.

In terms of the response to the Child Welfare League, I just want stress that this is the beginning of it. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Minister. Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Minister's response. The Minister made some note just now of the need to put a priority on hiring Northerners and the need to integrate qualified employees into the system. I think everyone would support the granting of priority to Northerners, but is that a condition of employment? Is that something that must be filled, or are we in a situation here where if we cannot find enough qualified Northerners to fill the ten positions, we can then look elsewhere? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Dent. Madam Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, initially, we were hopeful that we would be able to identify ten Northerners, perhaps people who were not practicing in social work right now that might have been able to be brought back into the system. Unfortunately, we were not able to find a full complement of ten in our initial scan, so we have reverted to making northern hire a priority, but we will take other candidates as well in order to fill those ten positions. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Minister. Mr. Dent.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Minister's response, and support that move. I would like to go back to the issue of the relationship between the departments and the boards, also to examine again the number of reports that we have and where we are going with bringing in Mr. Cuff to do another review.

My concern comes from the numbers of times we have had different reports. Look at the report that the Child Welfare League did. They talk about the dynamic tension that exists between the Department of Health and Social Services and boards with regard to the need for accountability and the need for flexibility.

While they talk about one aspect only, I think that the whole issue of tension exists between the need for the Minister to be accountable to this House, the department to make sure that they can help the Minister to be accountable, and the issue of providing services at the local level.

One of the things that the Child Welfare League report noted was that the key to successfully negotiating the unnecessary tension between the two seemingly conflicting agendas is for the two parties to continue to work in partnership to meet their respective responsibilities.

Whether or not that will be successful, they say, depends on the skilled negotiation of the interface, which creates the dynamic tension. If it is successful, it will strengthen the processes and the outcome.

That report was done in May 2000. In July 2000, Minister Groenewegen published the Minister's Response to the 1999 Forum on Health and Social Services.

A number of the forum recommendations had to do with governance. They talked about the need to clarify roles and responsibilities of each player, but one of the other key recommendations of the Minister's forum was the need to devolve responsibility and funding to boards for most health and social services programs.

Obviously, one of the recommendations they followed up with, after that, was that there needs to then be a procedure established for flowing board responsibilities to communities.

The Minister, in her response, indicated, now some time ago, that a revised funding formula was being developed during the current fiscal year. I have not heard that there is a new funding formula. I have heard that there is difficulty with understanding numbers, so that we have not agreed on budgets.

Are we, in fact, moving, as the forum had recommended, to a funding formula, which would take into account services that were expected to be delivered, and the population served, including the movement of populations within the North?

I think that is going to be of interest to us. This was promised to us last year. In fact, if we look at the strategic plan of the Department of Health, which was presented to Members some time ago, this was exactly as stated in there.

One of the strategic directions was to improve management of the system by clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the department, boards, private service providers, and non-profit organizations.

One of the other strategic directions was to improve the overall functioning of the public system of health and social services by promoting strong relationships between agencies and governments.

One way to do that was to improve the allocation of financial resources to boards through funding methods, which reflect population characteristics and board responsibilities.

In the business plan last year, Mr. Chairman, we were told that the department was going to develop clearer reporting and accountability requirements for system partners, develop clearer working relationships for system partners, and continue to develop appropriate funding arrangements for boards and NGOs.

So we have a couple of reports that have suggested to the department that they need to work more closely with boards and need to find a way to be more supportive. In fact, in a response to one of those reports, the Minister herself appears to agree with that direction and commit the department to moving that way.

So I have to ask, as a question, knowing that this was happening, why is such an importance being placed now on the recommendations on governance that we are expecting from the report from Mr. Cuff?

We have already, it would appear to me, gotten an awful lot of recommendations here. We appear to be moving to deal with only some of these recommendations and now we have embarked on another study, when we had two other studies that already told us what to do. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Dent. Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, there was a comment made about the length of my answers. Mr. Dent has certainly covered a wide range of issues and it is difficult to give a short answer, unless we pick just one facet of his question and respond to that.

However, I will try to respond to what I can remember. The Cuff review is intended to take into consideration those previous recommendations that were made.

So it is more focused on recommendations for actions to be taken, as opposed to the emphasis on the review section of it, except to review those reports that have already been done.

It is also contained in the terms of reference that system resourcing, adequacy and equitability of funding allocations to boards, clarity and fairness of board funding allocations, adequacy of board support resources in the department, determination of board forced growth requirements, adequacy of staffing models for nursing and physicians, appropriateness of the surplus deficit retention policy, capacity of department, provide an appropriate and effective monitoring.

So a lot of the issues that Mr. Dent raises with respect to resourcing the boards are clearly identified in the terms of reference of the Cuff review and we are looking for action related recommendations.

Some of the previous reports did identify problems where there were deficiencies and did not always have attached to them, in every instance, a clear action associated with them.

So that is a couple of areas, Mr. Chairman, that Mr. Dent has covered. I will ask Mrs. Ballantyne if she would just speak a little bit more in detail on the issue of the work with the boards to ensure that they are adequately resourced. Thank you.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Mrs. Ballantyne.

Thank you, Mrs. Ballantyne. Mr. Krutko.