Yes, I could tell the Member that, as Minister of the department, I had made it very clear from day one to the senior officials that I believe in adhering to affirmative action policies. You will see that in our departmental reorganization and appointments that I have been part of that we have given due consideration to the principles of the Affirmative Action Policy.

Also, at the rank and file level, obviously, Affirmative Action Policy is a guiding principle, and in all of our training programs I don’t think there is any question that we are wanting and we do what we can and we do everything we can to encourage and support our people, NWT residents too, and especially people from small communities to take on those challenges, get trained and also encourage them to go back to the communities they come from. I could tell you that we have nothing as successful, because I have run into lots of people at Stanton Territorial Hospital, for example, who are from elsewhere in the Territories who choose to live and work in Yellowknife rather than going back to some of the communities they come from.

I could tell you, Mr. Chairman, we have information on breakdowns for the authorities. For Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority, we have 220 employees there and about 25 percent are indigenous aboriginal. We have 75 percent who are non-aboriginal. All of the senior management at Beaufort-Delta are female. For Deh Cho, 49 percent, almost 50 percent are indigenous aboriginal out of 85 employees. All of the management are female. For Fort Smith, 49 percent out of 127 employees are indigenous aboriginal. Forty-seven percent are non-aboriginal. Senior management is 100 percent indigenous aboriginal. For the Sahtu, out of 65 employees, 41 percent are indigenous aboriginal and 58 percent are non-aboriginal. For senior management, none of them are indigenous aboriginal or female. For Stanton Territorial Authority, out of 474 employees, 10 percent are indigenous aboriginal, 9.7 percent indigenous non-aboriginal and 80 percent are non-aboriginal, 66 percent of the management are female. For Deh Cho, out of 76 employees, 61.8 percent are indigenous aboriginal and 38 percent are non-aboriginal. For Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority, out of 155 employees, 11.6 percent are indigenous aboriginal, 7.1 percent indigenous non-aboriginal and 81 percent is non-aboriginal. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It will be good when we can get that information, if the Minister could provide that to Members because there are numbers that you were calling out that won’t match what is on the page here. If anything,

the numbers are higher than what is being announced here. Also in regards to your percentages, I think it is important in order to get the feel for the percentages. I think you have to know what the status of those individuals are. Are they janitorial positions? Are they basically administration positions or are they actually the doctors or nurses? You can break it down by groups. I would just like to know if you can also provide that so when you talk about a high percentage…But I mean, you can have a high percentage, but those could be the low paying jobs versus people on the administration/management side of the health care system. I would just like to ask the Minister if we can get that information.

I would like to ask a question before I go. There was a program in the past called Public Service Career Development Program which was very helpful to the public service by way of allowing our employees to take career courses and programs so they can enhance themselves. Has the department considered looking at something like that? I know we are looking at the area of the Nursing Program. We are getting people into that program. I think there are other areas within that structure we can look at in regards to the social service side, the mental health side, the career development side so we can deal with problems where we have a bottleneck and basically have people interested but they just don’t have that sort of vocation or the capacity. Is that something the Minister can deal with? Thank you.

My information is that we do not have that public service career advancing program but we do have built into our system the Health and Social Services Human Resources Professional Development Training Program where the employees can access them where they can. For some of those services, we also ask them to do a return of services agreement.

Mr. Chair, I agree with the Member that in the Health and Social Services system, it is not only what we provide but who provides it. We do need to continually focus on training our people to advance in the Health and Social Services field and encourage and support them as much as possible to go back to help the people from which they come as much as possible. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do have a question related to page 8-10. It indicates an increase in seven positions from last year’s active position summary 2009-10. If I can get an explanation of the reasons for the increase, please.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Lee.

The vast majority of them come from the investments we are making on DI/PAC and electronic health records. Thank you.

I have two questions. Will these positions be ongoing in future years? How are these positions funded? Is this federal dollars which are currently funding them and will the federal dollars be available in future years to fund these positions if they go on forever? Thank you.

These are indeterminate positions ongoing and it is part of our strategic investment. Thank you.

It is my understanding that we are getting a fairly large component of federal dollars for these particular programs, the...(inaudible)...health programs and so on. I guess I would like to know whether or not the federal funding…We are receiving federal funding in the 2009-10 year and if that federal funding will continue beyond this next fiscal year for the electronic health records and the DI/PACs and so on programs. Thank you.

This is supported by federal funding for capital projects but we are supporting O and M, so it is sort of a partnership. It is not part of the staff funding or any other…There are all kinds of different federal funding but this one we see ongoing for the foreseeable future. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister for that answer. If this cost for seven PYs is going to carry on as an item and if, as it has been described, these particular health information systems are going to create some efficiencies and so on, is there an expectation that there will be savings as we move towards more electronic information systems? Will any of the cost of the extra seven PYs be offset by efficiencies or savings as we go into the full cooperation for all these programs, Telespeech, IEHR, EMR and the DI/PAC systems? Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, this is a partnership between the GNWT and the federal government in a way, thought there is not a formal contract. The federal government is providing upwards of $13.5 million for us to be able to put in those capital equipment, DI/PAC, Telespeech machines and electronic health records programming. GNWT is providing O and M funding for almost $7 million, so it is a $20 million project.

The Member’s question is how we measure these efficiencies. I think, from anything we know, that if we could have Telespeech stations in all of these schools and health centres that we are placing

them in, we hope to be able to use them so that our children and clients in these small communities could access service. Now is that going to save us money? I don’t know, but it certainly will enhance service and make services available to these people who need them and didn’t have them before.

For DI/PAC, I think it will do enormous good for people in our communities to be able to not have to travel somewhere to have their images and pictures looked at and be interpreted. Often, sometimes it is really hard to tell in health care funding, if you put in $10, are you going to get $10 in savings, because sometimes having more in there increases services. It may add more medical travel. It is really hard to do a straight correlation. But for the health and social services system, we know that our residents value every service we do. We have to constantly meet the challenges of streamlining and bringing efficiencies to the system so that we could keep up with the growth. But it will never be have we saved $100,000 here so we can use it for something else. That is hard to do. Thank you.

Thank you for the explanation. I don’t have anything against the value of these programs. I think this is the way that we should be going, that we should be moving towards the use of greater technology. I just wondered if there was any known savings at this point that could be identified. That is fine that there isn’t. I would ask the department, as we go through this next year and as these programs pretty much get into full operation, that the department look at providing some sort of a measure and to try to determine the benefit of these programs. The business plans that we reviewed in November did have measures for various items within the business plan. I would ask the department to provide a measure for the value of these particular programs in next year’s business plan. Thank you.

Yes, I think that is a really important point in that while I am saying we are not going to be able to demonstrate that we are going to save $300,000 or $500,000 or whatever, I think we need to be able to demonstrate that by having this, our cost increase might not be as high as it might otherwise be. I also want to offer the Member and the standing committee that I have been advised of this person who are a little bit of a guru about how the electronic equipment and programs that are in place are going to revolutionize our health care delivery system and they have offered to meet with any Members who might want to have more information on that. I think it’s something that would be very worthwhile because he will be able to show how essential this is and that it might actually save us money, if not reduce further costs as we go forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Hawkins.

Mr. Chairman, still on page 8-10. If I can get an account for any of the pluses and minuses of positions and what specific positions they are. The raw numbers account for seven in gross for indeterminates. When we look at total, it appears to be a change of 12, but sometimes that’s not necessarily the true reflection of the change. For example, if there were 12 positions gained in this particular area, that could mean 14 positions were new but two were reduced which would give me that number. I’d like to know how many positions were reduced and how many positions are presented as new and what positions are they. I think I’ve heard the DI/PAC with plus seven so it shouldn’t take long to account for most of these, I assume. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister Lee.

We have a new position under Building Our Future strategic initiative, in-house respite services, another position full-time under Healthy Choices framework, another on enhancing emergency services which is a policy analyst legislative person who is tasked to work on ambulance and ground ambulance services in partnership with MACA. We have five new positions under electronic health and medical records and imaging, that’s under DI/PAC so those are eight new positions. What are we missing? Two positions? Those are eight positions. Five full-time and five part-time. Sorry.

I have to admit, that was a little bit confusing because if I add the five full-time and the five part-time, they didn’t really add up to...I’m still trying to find...I’ve got more than 12, I guess, the way the Minister spelled it out. If we can get some further clarification...Just run through it really fast. I’ve got the respite, I’ve got the healthy choice, I’ve got the emergency service policy person, five electronic health, DI/PAC, but I thought she said there were seven DI/PAC positions.

Mr. Chairman, in short, if the Minister is willing to provide this in writing as soon as possible, I’ll accept that. Were any positions reduced in this exercise of changes within the active position summary and what were they?

Mr. Chairman, there were no positions reduced and I’d be happy to provide the information in writing. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Anything further, committee? On page 8-10, active positions summary, information item.