Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, being from a smaller community I appreciate the Member's concern. It's something that we struggled with as we did this document. Very clearly there has been a change in how services are delivered, as the Member has pointed out. All doctors don't do surgery anymore. They may do minor surgery, but even things like appendicitis, unless it's an emergency they are shipped out. There are liability issues. There's cost of having more than one location to do surgery. There's the use, the numbers that would warrant in terms of cost-effectiveness of being able to sustain a service where there's a very low usage. Those are the decisions we had to look at. As the Member knows, the constant pressure of more problems than there are resources, but there is still clearly a need in the area of the things we talked about and being more effective on the public health side. We're moving towards rehabilitation teams that we want to have set up that do occupational therapy and audiology and physiotherapy, speech pathology. We want to move those out to the regions. There definitely has been a change in service delivery over the years.
As the Member will see in the next few weeks when the document is presented to them, we have attempted to address that, because the occupancy numbers, especially on the acute care side in the Northwest Territories were very low. We had a significant surplus of acute care beds in Yellowknife, Fort Smith and Hay River and, to a lesser extent, Inuvik, because they built the new hospital anticipating the drop in acute care requirement and didn't build as many acute care beds as they formally had. It's a significant issue. Thank you.