Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, providing quality health care and supplying health care workers should be a priority of this government. We train northerners to become nurses to staff our hospitals, yet we have to continue to bring up nurses from the South. I understand, Mr. Speaker, that we need these nurses to come north and they are well compensated for their time up here. Until we can staff our hospitals with northern nurses -- and hopefully that day will come soon -- we have to continue to use southern nurses. The message we have to send to our northern, long-term nurses is we will compensate you as well as we do the southern nurses. We have nurses who have come north years ago and decided to make the North their home, and for that we thank them.
The point I am trying to make, Mr. Speaker, is that northern and long-term nurses should also enjoy some of the benefits as their southern counterparts. We should have a retention bonus paid for every few years of service in the North. It could be two nurses, Mr. Speaker, working side by side, one from the North and one from the South. The one from the South will be making more in benefits than the one from the North, and they can go back home and enjoy a lower cost of living than the one from the North having an extreme high cost of living and they are paid less than their southern counterparts.
So, Mr. Speaker, we need long-term and northern nurses in the North and let's do what we can, as a government, to make that a reality and compensate them as they deserve. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
---Applause