Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I was very pleased that the officials were able to work out an agreement with the federal government and that surgeries have been booked. It started being delivered in Hay River as of Monday. I was hoping to be there for the opening, but I couldn’t make it.

I think what’s really important to note here is that the dispute we had with the federal government was that there are costs associated with dental service, and the federal government is only paying for these non-insured health benefits to our aboriginal population. Dental surgery is not an insured service. I think everybody should know that. GNWT does not pay for dental surgery; that is not part of our health care plan. It is a plan that the federal government provides to aboriginal people of the Territories. That’s one of the reasons.

The other thing is that Stanton Territorial Hospital is over capacity. They are not able to offer the days available in their surgery room to provide this service, whereas Hay River and Inuvik have surgery rooms and surgery staff who are being underused. I think that as a government we need to make sure that, where the service can be provided in regional centres, we encourage that as much as possible. We had a waiting list of about 350 kids in the South Slave area that we needed to address. So that is why we had to push that really hard to get it to happen.

I am willing to look at what’s possible in areas other than Hay River and Inuvik, but the focus right now is to get it done and get it running and reduce the waiting list in the South Slave area. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.