Thank you, Madam Chair. I have to say that I too am very concerned about the Stanton deficit situation and I think that we have a responsibility here to find out what is going on and try to fix the situation. Madam Chair, I have to say that as chair of Standing Committee on Social Programs we were not aware of the deficit that has been accruing with respect to this operation. It appears that from the information given to us, that deficit has been mounting for a number of years, since 1996, with the last year being the worst. I would think they're probably accumulating a deficit as we speak. We have no way of knowing whether it's because their demands for service are larger than the money that we are paying, and if that is the case then we need to address that.
We also have information that suggests that the supplies and purchased service costs were underfunded and I'd like to know why that was the case. Given all the issues that we're hearing in terms of the moral issues and the hiring issues, whether they be new nurses or experienced nurses, medical staff, it really breaks my heart that the Stanton hospital, which I believe is such an important hospital and one that has been a leader in the health care delivery here in the Territories, that it is under constant pressure. It's obviously under financial pressure and it's under human resource pressure, for whatever reason, and I'm not convinced that this government and the department and the Minister have a handle on what's going on. This has been going on a very long time.
I could tell you that I'm surmising from the information here that we are somehow underfunding that, but on the other side I have to tell you that I have had former staff of the hospital that come to tell me that there is money probably not being used as efficiently as possible in terms of acquiring equipment. The entire maintenance section have had issues brought about that.
I see that financial review of the hospital was done, but I'm wondering if it's not time for us to do an operational review of that hospital. Because you know, with respect to human resource management, we minimized that inquiry to the human resource management review alone. But I'm saying this not to target anyone and I know that the CEO at the hospital is new and all of these issues were occurring way before her time there. So I want to make it clear that when I'm speaking here about the issues and problems that we must face head on, I'm not attributing that to her at all. But I think for the government, this is an important health care facility and we must find out what is going on and we must address that. If it's about underfunding, we need to find a way to fund it. If it's misuse of money, not misuse of money, but mismanagement of resources there, we need to know and we need to know why. I don't think that's out of the question based on some of what I've heard. I'm not going to be able to verify that because I don't know the insides of that. The only way I could know that is to have somebody go in there and find out what's going on. This is a huge issue and I'm interested in hearing from the Minister how we could address this in a positive way so that we don't have this happening years in the future. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.