Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, Hay River is again experiencing, or should I say

still experiencing, a physician shortage. This is probably the worst outlook that we have had in terms of prospective recruits to fill the five funded positions for physicians than we've had in a long time.

Mr. Speaker, today, and maybe in the next few days, I am going to be talking about health care in Hay River, and today I would like to give a little background perspective in terms of the history of health care in Hay River.

In 1948, a young bible college graduate and his bride made their trek to Hay River. Ken and Sarah Gaetz wanted to start a church. In a small frontier town like Hay River in the late 1940s, you didn't show up, rent a hall and tell people to come to your church. No, instead they looked around for needs in the community. For awhile, Ken Gaetz was a Boy Scout leader and then he drove a garbage wagon. He did whatever needed to be done to help out and, in the process, he got to know the town and its people.

In those days, the government didn't have a nursing station let alone a hospital, so in the Old Town, Ken Gaetz set up a nursing station and recruited a nurse. Eventually he recruited a doctor who married the nurse, and that's another whole story.

Ken Gaetz and his fledgling nursing station and his little church were affiliated with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. It became known throughout the Pentecostal Church network across Canada of the work of this young couple in the North. A man by the name of H.H. Williams passed away in southern Ontario and his estate directed a gift to the health care effort in the Hay River, Northwest Territories. With that seed money, the hospital was built. More doctors and more nurses came over the years and Ken Gaetz became the administrator of that hospital. Concurrently with the work in Hay River, Ken Gaetz visited smaller communities up and down the Mackenzie Valley. There, the mission built homes and churches in these small communities.

When doctors and nurses were recruited by the Pentecostal Sub-Arctic Mission, they came to Hay River knowing that the mission would provide them with accommodation, and only a portion of the pay that they were normally entitled to and the bulk of their earnings would go to support the workers and the churches in the smaller communities. In exchange, the doctors and nurses would have an opportunity to travel throughout the North while offering their professional services in Hay River.

They would visit and support the mission stations and this successfully continued for many years. In 1975, the Government of the Northwest Territories built a hospital in Hay River. The hospital was then contracted to the mission to then operate.

Mr. Speaker, I will conclude my history of health care in Hay River with that, but tomorrow I am going to continue on and explain that maybe there is something we are missing here in terms of what we need to give people as a vision if we want to get them to come to the North. Maybe it is more than a job. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause