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.