Thank you for that. Mr. Chairman, for myself, I am going to come at it from an opposite angle. I think in most cases we have some great programs out there, but I think in the case of the Mental Health Alcohol and Drug Program we had great plans for that program. Now we are going to see mental health and alcohol and drug workers in all the communities, that they are going to be able to take over what the NGOs were providing before when they were government employees. We went through the whole thing of reclassifying these positions, bringing them under the government employment list where they see government benefits and bring in their salary levels with similar type positions. In the case of those positions, we also set up a system where they had to have a certain type of degree, in which most of the individuals that were providing the programs in our communities, alcohol and drug workers, who worked there for 20 or 25 years, basically provided the service, which most of them were alcohol and drug centres and whatnot in the past. The problem I see is that we have two classes of constituents where we have urban type of medical services -- Yellowknife, Inuvik, Fort Smith and Hay River -- but then you have the rural challenges that we are facing where we cannot find people to go into those communities with those types of qualifications. I talk about program delivery support services and systems. I think you have to come to the reality that the systems that we have, it doesn’t work for all, that you have to allow for some programs to be devaluated so that we can look at the qualifications and classifications for those particular positions. Because, from my view, regardless if you have someone who may not, who totally qualifies as a mental health worker who does not have a master’s degree in psychology or whatnot, does not mean that the people can deal with the issues of mental health in communities.

Most of our mental health issues in our communities are related to the grief and despair that a lot of people in our communities live with in regards to the loss of loved ones, the violence, the abuse that most people have faced in regards to residential school. I think that those types of issues have to be dealt with in regard to more family healing, trying to calm, versus an individual. I think this program that we have in our communities...The same thing with the nursing programs and whatnot that we have by way of our communities. We have people trained in Yellowknife. They go back to their communities. They say, sorry, we will train you and

get you certified in the Northwest Territories, but you are not really a nurse. You are just a bottom nurse, but you can’t work in your home communities because of that classification of the training that individuals take.

In regard to these types of situations, I know I raised the issue yesterday and here again today in the House regarding the mental health position in Fort McPherson, but we are also having challenges in Tsiigehtchic and some of the other smaller communities to track the nurses and whatnot in those communities. I would like to ask the Minister, are you considering looking at a re-evaluation or reassessment of the delivery system that we have to have people…I don’t want to say declassify them or under classify them, but find a system that works for small communities that we may not need the type of mental health positions you may have in the larger centres which maybe can get along with someone who basically has more of a healing background versus social and psychological background. I would like to know if that is something that you can consider looking at in light of the challenges we are facing in our small communities.