Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, the department has begun this review, a zero-based review, looking at program spending to determine in what areas the spending is occurring, whether it is authorized in the sense of mandated programs or has there been a growth in program delivery in areas we would call expansion of the service delivery, though it may not be directly tied to a mandate. That expectation has come in.
I’ll give you an example, Mr.
Chairman. The
department, when they initially looked at the area of services provided to people in the Northwest Territories — this is a number of years ago — found that through the help of companies and individuals, the Stanton Foundation helped Stanton purchase some equipment to put in service for the people of the Northwest Territories.
I’ll use the CAT scan as an example, a vital service that’s helped a lot of people. Stanton was never set up initially to deliver that, so we’ve had to, over the
years, begin adding to that. They found after the first year of operation they had to double up their teams because the service was used at a higher rate than was anticipated or budgeted for. It’s examples like that we will find come to the surface. It comes to delivery.
Now, who would say that we should stop that level of service? I don’t think anybody in the North would agree with that. In fact, as we heard from a Member already, we should be enhancing some of our service delivery, whether it’s territorial, regional or community. There’s a need for a level of service across the Northwest Territories.
For the specific response, I don’t know whether the Minister would have all of that, right down to who authorized it, and I don’t think we want to get to that level of debate in this Assembly, at least in this forum. But for the information about unfunded positions and the unfunded programs I’ll go to the Minister of Health and Social Services.