Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, with regard to the community health programs as we were going through earlier, we could see the number of vacancies. It seemed like a lot of them are in communities. One of the problems we have in our communities is the lack of professionals, people with different educational backgrounds, such as mental health workers and social workers. Plus, with the high turnover rates we seem to see with the nurses and doctors in our communities, there are no real long-term support mechanisms in our communities.
Is there room within this budget to allow for or to ensure that we have a full slate of people in our communities, so that we do not have the problem with vacancies in the different areas because we are not able to find accommodation, or because there is a lack of capacity between the wages of, say $50,000 for a mental health worker where you can get $85,000 working in Yellowknife, or even Inuvik?
There also seems to be the different specialists all in the regional centres. Is there anything being done to ensure that we have the ability to develop our capacity in our communities? Have the resources and the people, so they can provide services with respect to family violence issues that may arise in our communities, or looking at child support matters. We deal with those matters in our communities so that we do not have to see our children or family members having to leave the communities and go elsewhere because we do not have the resource people in our communities.
I would like to ask the Minister whether there is anything in this budget that allows for this, to ensure we have the people who are needed in our communities to carry out those responsibilities. What are you doing to ensure we have a full slate of people without having all these vacancies affecting the delivery of program services in our communities?