Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I share the Member's concern and her assessment that when you look at the indicators and we look around us on simple things at the number of people who don't drink anymore or the number of people who don't smoke anymore, I would think we are making progress. But when we look at the overall consumption levels, one of the things it leads me to think is fewer people are drinking more.
---Laughter
Can we count things differently or are we asking the right questions? That could be the issue. The other problem for us as well is we have a relatively small population and in many cases nationally they don't even count us because we aren't statistically significant.
The other problem with being a small jurisdiction and a small number of people is relatively few incidents of any one thing can be seen as a big percentage, though overall it's not really.
So I guess I don't have a clear answer for the Member. We struggle to make sure that we count things the most accurate way possible, but in terms of our outcomes, we know nationally we spend about 20 percent of our budget on health and social services. Other jurisdictions on health alone are spending over 40 percent of their budget. On the other hand, we know on a per capita basis in the Northwest Territories, we are probably second nationally in terms of how much money we spend per capita on health per person, second only to Nunavut. So once again, we have the same dollar figure looked at from two different ways.
In one way, we are only spending half as much as other jurisdictions are and on a per capita basis, we are spending the second highest in the country.
Madam Chair, the whole issue of quantifying our outcomes is a difficult one. Thank you.