Thank you, Mr. Chair. The territorial health expenditures just run over $325 million per year. The staffing is about 1,257. We have our own health board in the Sahtu, which runs about a $10 million operation. When you look at the numbers here in terms of the amount of dollars that are spent in the Sahtu compared to some of the regions, knowing the Sahtu is deemed as an isolated region with the winter roads only going for three months of the year and a lot of fly-in/fly-out of the services there, when you look at other regions that have some of the communities that are along the all-weather roads, they seem to have the same budget. You’d think that regions that have fly-in/fly-out services, that their budget would somewhat increase in terms of the operations. But we seem to be on par with some of the other regions in terms of them running their health boards. I’m not too sure how funding is allocated in terms of the types of services we have from the different regions. I just noticed that in there and there’s probably a good explanation as to how our funding gets to... I’m just making an observation.

The other one I want to ask the Minister -- and Ms. Bisaro brought it up in her comments -- is the way that the government is going to look at hopefully secure funding to the transfers that have been in our budgets that are going to sunset. These are millions of dollars here, these programs. The federal government has so far indicated that they’re not going to entertain any type of agreement to secure them, and I think there is some discussion as to how do we seek millions of additional dollars to continue with these programs. It just means that there’s a shifting of how we deliver services in the North to our people here in Yellowknife or into our communities. Hopefully the Minister can give us some type of game plan as to what, for sure, she could say in the House, confidently, that we’re going to work on these issues with the federal government in terms of transfers that are going to be sunset. As Ms. Bisaro indicated, March is coming up and that’s something that we really need to look at.

Mr. Chairman, the issue of diabetes has been a growing concern of mine in the region. More and more people are being diagnosed, and more and more people could be possibly looking for some type of test in terms of the condition of their health, namely to see if they are on the brink of becoming a diabetic. For six years, Mr. Chairman, I know health has always been an issue here and it seems that the basic services of diabetes testing and diabetes care is very important to the people in the Sahtu

and the service of health care in our smaller communities. We still need to deal with how health care is delivered in our small communities. They made some great strides in improving the services. In the community of Deline they have the telehealth supplies or operations there, but they’re not using it. What’s up with that?

I think that the telehealth was a good thing; however, it’s not being used. Even to put telehealth or something like that along that line in the community of Colville Lake. They don’t have an RCMP. They don’t have social workers. They don’t have a nurse on a regular basis like other communities. You know, people up there need services. They have to feel confident in this government that it’s going to provide these services. They have agreements with our health boards. There are agreements with the communities to provide health care services. They are making some difference in terms of the services, however, in this day and age it’s unacceptable to go to Colville Lake with 134 people and not provide some basic services, such as having a nurse there. You have people who are trained as laypersons with one day training here, one day training there. That doesn’t quite fit the goals of the Health department’s mandate here.

So these are concerns that I know my people want to see, hoping that one day we will see a presence of a nurse in Colville Lake, as I heard other communities like Tsiigehtchic, like their community, or other communities in the Northwest Territories.

We do want to thank the Minister for her Foundation of Change, because that gives us some hope, yet it’s still on paper so we haven’t seen the real work of it. The Foundation of Change does give us hope to see that we can do things differently in the Sahtu towards alcohol and drug programs, the structure and the governance of how do we deliver health in the communities, roles and responsibilities. Mr. Chair, as you have noted many times, there is expertise among people in our communities that can deal with wellness. They may not have a university degree or some western style of training; they have a degree in culture and a degree in how to work with people on the cultural basis. We are not utilizing these people in traditional methods of healing and wellness. We seem to be putting them on a pedestal when we want them, but we don’t want to use them in a formal sense of having these services in our community. We still rely on the psychologists or the medical practitioners.

A lot of people have told me that when they go to the health centres, a lot of the times they’re just given pills and told to go home. So services are not the same as in larger centres, and I know because I live in a community and I’ve experienced that.

So I look forward to this Minister rolling up her sleeves. We’ve got about 20 months left in this Assembly to see what big changes we can do. I will work with the Minister, and I said before in the House that she did a tour with us in the Sahtu and she heard our people speak and she knows what our needs are. So I want to say, Mr. Chair, that I look forward to going through the budget with her, looking to see where we can make some differences in the health care or in the social service area. Even that, we don’t have social services in one of our communities because of the housing. That is unacceptable. However, there’s lots of time to go through in detail and see what this Minister can do to improve some of the care in the Sahtu.

In closing, I wanted to ask the Minister later on in terms of how is she working with the Stanton Health Authority to look at how she can bring aboriginal foods into the hospital. Sixty-five percent of clients are aboriginal people and they survive solely on a lot of aboriginal foods we serve to them, especially caribou. They like that kind of food in the hospitals when they are getting well. So I’ll ask the Minister later on in terms of what her plans are in looking at the Stanton Hospital master plan development. Mahsi.