Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the unedited Hansard of October 3 the Minister of Health and Social Services stated that “anywhere else in Canada, dental surgeries are provided by private clinics. There’s no reason why the private clinics in Yellowknife couldn’t look at opening that.” Not necessarily.
In the South the way it works is very few clinics actually have these specialty services. Most clinics are like the clinics in the Northwest Territories. There are indeed specialist clinics that do it, and I think it’s unreasonable to expect that the clinics in Yellowknife — as opposed to the clinics in Hay River and Inuvik, which are basically the same as the clinics in Yellowknife — can take on that capacity. I think our solution to ensuring that our children are getting the dental surgery they need is to open up time in Stanton.
To that end, I’d like the Minister to commit today to at least opening the one day every eight weeks that they have available as well as any scheduled drop time, when they shut down the wards for regular surgeries, and provide that time to the dentists in Yellowknife so that they can work with the dentists in Hay River and Inuvik to reduce this backlog of children who are suffering from oral problems and require dental surgery.