Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to take a little different tact here when it comes to the Department of Health and Social Services. I think we have a system that can be adjusted, that could do better, I am sure. Every community should have a nurse and everybody should have access.

But overall, in general terms, as a government we are spending $326 million on health and social services for 42,000 people in a remote and often rural part of Canada. It is a very big challenge, but I think for the most part we have a Cadillac version of health and social services here in the Northwest Territories.

One thing that irks me is how many times we have to spend a lot of money to come up with some program, some plan, some doctrine to follow when

the things that we need to do in terms of basic services to people is pretty straightforward. I know we get often into a lot of other specialty kinds of care and programming. That is fine, but I guess I have been around for a long time and now we have a Foundation for Change. I remember when I was Minister of Health, it was the Cuff report and we were going to integrate and we were going to come up with areas of specialty in the communities. It just seems like we have always got some expensive little road map in our hands that makes us happy, when in fact the needs of the people in the Northwest Territories are pretty straightforward. But I think we have a lot of professional, caring, concerned, genuinely dedicated people out there in our communities on the front lines, with the exception… And I do not wish to pay any disrespect to Mr. Krutko’s concerns or Mr. Jacobson’s concerns about access to health services in their communities that they represent. I don’t want to pay any disrespect to that, because we are fortunate in larger centres like Hay River and Yellowknife where you can walk into a clinic any time of the day or night and somebody is going to take care of you. But for the most part, there is no one that this government would not fly from the ends of the world to get to Yellowknife or Edmonton or any place where they could receive health care services. I don’t believe that apart from some logistical things, like I said, which my colleagues have referred to, I don’t think that this government is trying to deprive anyone of very high quality services when it comes to their health.

Now, having said that, if I were a health care provider and serving in that area in the Northwest Territories, I think it must be frustrating for them as well, because the fact of the matter is there are a lot of people in the Northwest Territories, a disproportionate amount of people in the Northwest Territories who are involved in activities which are detrimental to their health and to their well-being. They know the things they are doing are detrimental to their health and well-being and yet we send people out.

Mr. Chairman, you didn’t set my timer so I am now out of time. I have only been speaking for two minutes. Not even two minutes; one minute.

Thank you. I don’t often go on and on in Committee of the Whole.

You might have noticed, but this is something I just feel strongly about, so let me say it. A lot of people out there, a disproportionate amount of people are out there in the Northwest Territories are doing things which are detrimental to their health and well-being. They know it. I don’t know how far we as a government can go to stop them from doing it. We can create awareness. We can talk about nutritious foods. We can talk about smoking cessation. We can drop the pop. We can do all of

these things, but, at the end of the day, people have a personal responsibility to make a choice about how they live and how they live in relation to their health and well-being.

I’m not pointing fingers at people. I could live more healthy. I can exercise every day. I know that if I exercised every day, I would probably prolong my life. For the sake of my grandchildren, I should probably do that, but I am not doing it so I am talking about myself too. I read all the statistics about working too much, having too much stress, overeating, not exercising. I know all that stuff too, so I am in that guilty boat too, so please don’t think I’m being critical or judgmental here. But if I was a health care professional and I had people coming to see me that said I’m borderline diabetic but I drink 10 cans of pop a day… I mean, just look at the numbers of the amount of soft drinks that we consume in the Northwest Territories. It is in the millions of containers in a year. We know we have this emerging issue with diabetes, but if people still want to drink stuff that has 50 grams of sugar per serving, then what are we going to do as a government?

We can be running after these issues and trying to catch up with the problems but, you know, when I hear people talk about cancer rates, it is no different here than in any other part of the country. I don’t believe the cancer rates are higher than any place else. Somebody said that the elders are dying of cancer. You know what? Everybody dies, and everybody dies of something. Seriously. You have to die of something. You could be just fortunate and just go to sleep one night and not wake up. Generally speaking, everybody dies of something. When you are old, quite often you die. Absolutely.

---Laughter

For sure, you will die. Anyway, I’m not trying to be facetious, but our government is supposed to be the underpinning of a safety net in the area of health and social services. We are there to aid and help people, but we have got to have people who want to help themselves as well.

A lot of the money that we spend is in health and social services. It is really not because of lack of awareness. Some people get sick too, and some people don’t want medical care. Sometimes we say, well, that person didn’t find out they were sick until they went to the health centre. They died two days later. You know what? Some people know they are sick and don’t want to be treated. They do not want to be interfered with. They do not want to go through being taken away from their family. They don’t want to be a part of that. You hear that a lot. I understand that. Some people notice it and they just don’t want to deal with it.

If I was sick, I think I’d want to deal with it, but some people don’t, for whatever reason. I don’t think that we can take all the ails of the Northwest Territories

and beat up the Department of Health and Social Services and say we’re not doing enough as a government to try to meet the needs of the people. That is not something that I believe. I know there are glitches. I know there are things that happen sometimes that don’t make sense and in a Territory this small, if we get a situation like that and we have a constituent like that, we have the ability to talk to our MLAs. We go to the Minister. We say, hey, there’s something that’s not working here. There’s something that’s a problem here. Somebody was, somebody fell between the cracks, so to speak. We even get a response to those issues.

So I am not saying the system is perfect. I wish we spent more of our money doing the stuff that we know needs to be done rather than creating books that talk about it and lay out plans. I think everyone knows that I think we spend too much money on that kind of thing. I think we have to put this in the context of a relatively small number of people in a fairly far flung region of the country and we, as a government, are doing the best we can to meet the needs of that diverse and remote population. When you compare what we have to fall back on in the area of health and social services compared to anybody in the world, and I will say anybody in the world, we have got what is attempting to meet the needs of those people.

Again, I say with no disrespect to my colleagues who represent small communities where I would rather be spending money to put nurses and social workers in those small communities than I am to produce another report called Foundation for Change, okay? I want my colleagues to understand that. I want as much money to go to those frontline, basic services as possible, not specialty kind of boutique study things. All those kind of soft things that aren’t at the heart of delivering the services right to the people right on the front lines, we could do better in that area, I believe. But I think the intent is there, the financial commitment is certainly there. What we need, I think, from people to a large extent too, is commitment from people for their individual choices, because I think our medical system is dealing with a lot of people who are doing a disservice to their own health. I think we all have a role to play in addressing that. The government can’t fix all your problems and you can’t go to the doctor after you’ve used and abused yourself your whole life and say fix me, I’m sick, because it just isn’t possible. So that’s all I have to say. Thank you.