Thank you, Madam Chair. There are a number of areas that warrant discussion. I look forward to a bit more detail on them, but I guess just to give committee and the Minister a bit of a heads-up of the things that I want to pursue will be quite a handful of things here. Overall, our ability to grow our own workforce, we have had considerable success through Aurora College and the nurse training program there. But I am aware of a couple of situations where, even though we are returning nurses through the college process, we are choked with our ability in our hospitals to enable these young people, mostly young people, to do their preceptorships -- Is that the right word? -- and actually gain experience and gain a career.
Madam Chair, there is the need, as forecasted, for better design and outfitted dementia and cognitive disease services that continue to grow certainly across the territory, but it is becoming more acute here in Yellowknife. I will be looking for progress toward serving that need.
The area of servicing addictions, especially drug addictions, crack and cocaine, are also accelerating. The leadership provided by some NGOs is tremendous. I will be looking for some discussion on how our department is developing that partnership and carrying on with it.
Related to that, Madam Chair, is in the area of other kinds of addictions and lifestyle things. We are continuing with the overall assault on tobacco use. In fact, our Social Programs committee is having a public hearing tomorrow morning with the Minister on the Tobacco Control Act. So we have achieved some good things there. The Minister notes in his opening remarks, Madam Chair, that in the coming year, a healthy foods policy is being implemented. This is great news. An area of core concern for me, though, has been our government's inaction to directly address the area of alcohol abuse. We do so little in the area of awareness and prevention of alcohol abuse. There is a review underway of the Liquor Act we are about to engage there. I am hoping that, through that, we will be able to highlight the need for this government to be much more proactive where we have done so with tobacco. Now we are undertaking healthy foods. Why not alcohol, of something that causes so much damage, hurt and expense? I still do not see the need demonstrated here, or the desire demonstrated, to do anything really substantive about it.
Madam Chair, a considerable investment has been made and strategies and studies undertaken to see how we can better serve people in clinics and in emergency room areas here in at least the city of Yellowknife. I will be looking for some discussion on progress there.
We are taking more kids into foster care. We are doing this at an alarming rate. As the committee's report pointed out, and I think this was gleaned from the pre-budget consultations in the communities, where we seem not to be able to find out or do much about the causes of
issues of why young people, youth and children, have to be taken from their homes, but we are able, as I think our budget is outlining, to be spending another $400,000 on foster care. We are going in the wrong direction.
Madam Chair, if I could leave with a question, it is in regards to the huge expectations, the arrangements that are already there, but the expectations of where we are going to be able to go with the federal government, the new federal government, in terms of revisions to the way health care is delivered and how we are going to be able to sustain this very expensive but also cherished above all institutions that make Canada such a great country, and that is the equality of health care. Madam Chair, we do have a new federal government in place and a new Minister. How would Mr. Miltenberger characterize the near-term future and the sustainability of our health care system, at least in the context of the new federal government?