Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, we are committed to the use of multi-year contracts. I well know the aggravation and concerns that the Member has outlined that NGOs go through and the amount of time they spend year after year doing yearly contribution proposals and such. The Member has indicated that they would be monitoring us closely come September. We have made those commitments to committee and we will follow through on those.

I would also just like to touch base briefly on the issue of forced growth. This is a government-wide concern because there are services provided across government by NGOs, and the issue of adequately compensating them or recognizing that they have the same pressures we do is an issue that we are looking at. The Government of the Northwest Territories is putting out a third-party accountability framework which speaks to that in general terms at this point. Very clearly, there is a fundamental principle that we look at, and that is if the NGO was not providing the service, would we, as a government, step in and provide the service. That's a fundamental principle and criteria that's looked at. In some of our NGOs, we do have forced growth built in, but clearly it's not a comprehensive approach yet. It's one that we want to address within the Department of Health and Social Services, for sure. I know government-wide, it's an issue we are trying to get a frame around because of its implications.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I just want to ask the Minister to keep working on the forced growth issues and hopefully we will have more opportunity to discuss that in Social Programs committee in the days ahead.

I want to highlight another point from the Social Programs committee report and it has to do with treatment centres for troubled youth. In previous budget discussions under MACA, we spoke about some of the money going to youth. There is a Minister responsible for youth in this government and there are pockets of money and probably some of them quite significant, whether they be for sports and recreation or some of the youth conferences or whatever. I think what I would like to see, if we can organize it, is we should have as a goal at least one viable youth centre or youth activity place in every community. It doesn't have to be in away that the GNWT funds 100 percent of the money, but the GNWT taking a lead role or

working with community governments or aboriginal governments to make sure we are all working towards the same goal. The SideDoor in Yellowknife, for example, the history and struggle that centre had to go through to have the place built and then to fund the program, I know it has a program there and they do have a weekend program right now with support from the Department of Health and Social Services. They are still looking of funding and it's a constant struggle for the board and the people to make sure the program survives.

I wonder why it is that we do not have a comprehensive plan because I am sure there is enough money within the government and all the other community governments and aboriginal governments and some of the private sector. It seems to me it's just a lack of a big plan, a target that says in the next five years we would like to see a viable place for the youth to go to, a youth centre, a youth shelter. It is absolutely shameful that we had to witness a youth centre in Hay River close. The executive director there came and talked to us at the pre-budget hearing. He is one impressive young man and I won't be surprised to see him in this House years down the road if he decides to do that. It wouldn't be for lack of trying that he would have had to close that centre and we should all be reflective about the fact that a centre like that with the people behind it couldn't stay open. There is no question about how necessary that is. I would like to know if the Minister has given thoughts and talked to other Ministers, with the Minister responsible for Youth or at the Cabinet level, just talk about how do we bring it all together and have some kind of more tangible target and goal about how we address the issues pertaining to youth and place and centres for youth. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, one of my roles is that currently I am the chair of the social envelope Ministers which comprises, of course, Health and Social Services, Education, Justice, MACA, Housing, Madam Chair. We have talked about youth issues facing young people. We have made collaborative efforts with what is happening in the schools with what Minister McLeod outlined today through his responsibilities as Minister responsible for Youth. As well, we spend considerable amounts of money working with families and responding to youth in crisis.

The issue of is there a need to set up youth centres all across the land, that very well may be the case. One of the fundamental issues facing us, as in most governments, is the lack of resources to do so. Currently, we respond and assist the SideDoor, for example, on a one-time basis and we review it on an ongoing basis. But the reality is that we don't have a plan that is going to see infrastructure being built or funded in regards to youth centres at this particular juncture. I would point out that, in most communities, larger ones especially and I will use mine as an example, we have services and recreational facilities that are second to none for communities our size both in the land around the community as well as actual recreation services with the gyms, rinks, pools, and the curling rinks that are available, the weight room, the fitness centres, the drop-in centres that are there. As we look at issues related to youth, we have to never forget the connection back to the family and the role of the parents and what we do collectively together. Without that kind of support and connection, more facilities are not going to change things. It gets back to the prevention piece that I talked about in my opening comments. But the Member raises a good point. Clearly, we have to continue to work on this issue. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. General comments, Mr. Braden.

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?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I made a list of the concerns raised, but I will start with the last issue first. That is the relationship with the new federal government.

Madam Chair, coincidentally, I am not the longest serving, or very soon will be the longest serving Health Minister in the country now that the Minister from Saskatchewan has been transferred to another portfolio and the Minister from New Brunswick has announced his retirement.

I have been around since 2002. I have had the benefit of spending a couple of years at the federal/provincial table with Minister Clement when he was the Minister of Health for Ontario. He is very conversant, articulate and passionate about the issues facing jurisdictions to deal with the very many problems.

Once again, coincidentally, I also had the opportunity to tour Mr. Clement up as far as going into Sachs Harbour. We took him north. We fuelled up in Kugluktuk and went into Sachs Harbour. We met with the community. There are pictures of himself and some of his staff standing in the Arctic Ocean to give him a sense of the vastness in scale of the Northwest Territories. They have never been there before, so I have been able to give him that personal experience. On that relatively personal level, I am very confident. I am also confident that Prime Minister Harper is going to honour the commitments that have been made in the past. While they may want to revisit some of the strategies, their commitment to health of Canadians is no less real or intense than the government that was there prior to them.

We will be, as the Premier indicated, writing to all our respective counterparts of the federal bureaucracy. I will be writing to Minister Clement. We anticipate that there will be a gathering, some calls and gatherings here of the federal/provincial/territorial ministries in the next few weeks to get operational.

If I could quickly touch on some of the other issues, or would you like me to wait on this? Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. General comments. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have some questions about the rehab teams he is speaking about in his opening statement. I think I am quite excited about this new initiative because there is such need for this service and the ones that we have had were mostly set up in Yellowknife. They were hard pressed to serve the headquarters area, and with these additional teams, we will now have four more teams, I think, one in Inuvik, Yellowknife, Hay River; actually, four teams altogether, I think. So it is a good initiative, but one that would require a lot of very successful recruitment plan. We all know, Madam Chair, how difficult it is nation-wide to recruit and retain health care professionals. We are speaking about hiring a whole new batch of physiotherapists, assistants to the therapists, speech language pathologists, speech aids,, and occupational therapists. These are positions that we really need and want. I think that it will really make a difference in the lives of everyone in the North to have more of these skilled people available and travelling more to, and actually operating out of, some of these regional centres.

I would like to know from the Minister whether he has a recruitment and retention plan that goes with this. I think that has to be an essential part of implementing this initiative. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will make some general comments, and I will ask Mr. Murray to provide some of the more specific planning detail, but, clearly, we see this as a good news story. We recognize that there are challenges to getting it up and running. The recognition of a need is there. There are currently huge waiting lists of hundreds of individuals, a lot of them children, waiting for services. We are going to stage this, and we are also going to do some fundamental things like work with HR to look at the classification of the positions that we are bringing forward for staffing to make sure that we can do a cross-country comparison to see if we are competitive, and take the steps necessary for a reclassification if that is indicated by that cross-country survey.

Madam Chair, with your indulgence, I will ask the deputy minister to speak more specifically about the plans for the establishment of the rehab teams. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Ms. Lee. I'm sorry. I was reading a note. Mr. Murray.

Thank you, Mr. Murray. Ms. Lee.

That being the increased federal investment from the last federal government. Madam Chair, on that, I hope it is not going to be the case that the actual hiring and seeing the bodies out there working and doing the audiology work and physiotherapy work is not going to be delayed too long. I was hoping that this would be up and running April 1st. With respect to classification of these positions, while they may be new positions within the department or our health care system, it is not the newest job on earth. Those jobs are around. Many of them we already have. The health care professionals went through a reclassification exercise not too long ago, so I am hoping that that is not going to be something that will keep this project from getting delayed. I just want to see it on the ground happening. There are kids in our school systems, and I am sure that is not just the case in Yellowknife but everywhere in the North, who need to get this support. Language pathologists are very much needed. Physiotherapists. The need is so there. Could the Minister or the deputy minister confirm that reclassification and hiring...I want him to tell us that the groundwork has been done, or it is almost done, and that, pretty soon after the budget is passed, we are going to see this on the ground quite quickly. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I would first like to point out that we have been working in very close collaboration with Education, Culture and Employment on the rollout of this particular project, and their involvement is absolutely critical to the success of this initiative because a lot of the work is going to be done in the schools with the teachers and special needs assistants that are going to be there who will be following through on the work that the team does in terms of setting up treatment planning and the care required by the various children who are going to be seen by these teams.

We are already putting the pieces in place. I would like to assure the Member. We, as a matter of course, continue to assess our competitiveness as a jurisdiction, since we are in a very competitive environment nationally. We have our own classification system that requires that we go through a certain process to, in fact, try to make sure that we are competitive on a national basis. Sometimes that's a process that takes time, but we are not waiting for that. We are going to move on this. The plan is there. The money has been identified and we have been working with Education to make sure we start rolling this out. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to move a motion. I would like to move that we report progress.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. The motion is in order. It's not debatable. All those in favour? All those opposed? The motion is carried.

---Carried

I will rise and report progress.

Can I have the report of Committee of the Whole? Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, your committee has been considering Bill 18, Appropriation Act, 2006-2007, and Committee Report 6-15(4), Standing Committee On Governance and Economic Development Report on the 2006-2007 Pre-Budget Review Process, and Committee Report 7-15(4), Standing Committee on Social Programs Report on the 2006-2007 Pre-Budget Review Process, and would like to report progress with two motions adopted and, Mr. Speaker, I move that the report of Committee of the Whole be concurred with. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.