Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the Minister for her opening remarks. I am just going to start off with where she finished off. I am very happy to hear that the Minister had decided to delay until April 1, 2010, the implementation of the Supplementary Health Benefits Policy. I am also happy that she acknowledged that it requires more work and that she’s going to go out and do full consultation. Clearly that’s what is needed in this case.

We need to get out there; we need to do the financial analysis; we need to talk to the stakeholders that are going to be affected; and we need to get that information from them so that a comprehensive and reasonable policy can be developed. I look forward to working with the Minister on that, as I’m sure many of my colleagues do, and I look forward to seeing how they proceed and go forward.

Not to be answered now, but certainly there’s a question that I’m hoping at some point the Minister will come to the Standing Committee on Social Programs and give us a bit of a timeline and outline on how the department plans to move forward on this. I look forward to that.

A comment I made yesterday with respect to the budget is I see that it’s only a 1 percent increase. Now, that on principle sounds really great. Not a significant growth in this area. But health care traditionally and consistently increases by about 6 percent to 7 percent in most other jurisdictions, and even in the Northwest Territories our forced growth in the government is around 3.5 percent or 3 percent. So when I see a 1 percent increase in the Department of Health, it appears to me to actually be a 2.5 percent or 2 percent decrease. Given the importance of the health services that we provide, I’m not a big fan of seeing a decrease in this department. I’d rather see that typical forced growth 3 percent. But we do need to find some efficiencies within the system to ensure the money we are spending is being spent in a reasonable and responsible way.

In going through the budget I’m still struggling with some of the deficits that we see out there and some of the authority. I know we did a lot of work in the last budget and there was some significant work

done in one of the supps to address some of the shortfalls that they had, and I see we’re still predicting some deficits in that area. I know a lot of work has been done to mitigate some of those challenges in the authorities, but we need to work a lot harder to find efficiencies within the system so that we’re not having any significant deficits in the individual authorities.

Some things that I’d like to have some more information on...Last session we talked a lot about the money that we believe that Nunavut owes us. We provide services through Stanton, which is a territorial authority. We provide a lot of services to residents of Nunavut out of the Kitikmeot region and keep hearing anecdotally, but also practically, that there’s money that technically they owe us that we haven’t been able to get out of them. I’m looking forward to hearing from the Minister and her staff about how the Minister plans to improve that situation, both through the 2009-2010 fiscal year and into the future, to ensure that the services we are providing to Nunavut are in fact being paid for.

I’m sad that there is no reference in this health budget to the milk subsidy. The Members on this side of the House passed a motion with all 11 Members...

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