Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, this government has tried to take strides in accommodating small communities by implementing health care providers in different areas; mental health position, alcohol and drug position, social worker. Nowhere does it say that you can have people in a community working in similar areas, so that you do have more than one person in the community. That doesn’t say you have to have two nurses. You could have a nurse and a mental health worker, a nurse and a social worker working out of the same office or same operation. But I think if you use the argument the Minister is providing, it’s just another excuse to do nothing. I think we’ve tried to find ways of accommodating communities with policing, by trying to find police for 10 communities that don’t have it.
A similar arrangement applies to the small communities. Maybe I will just read out for the Minister... This is prior to division. I will just use Tsiigehtchic for an example. It’s tracking expenditures that were done back in 1988-89. The Territorial Health Insured Services, $284,000 was spent in Tsiigehtchic; social assistance, $205,000 in Tsiigehtchic. It goes on with regard to hospital services outside the Northwest Territories, $110,000 for Tsiigehtchic. If you just look at those numbers alone, they were spending over $500,000 in Tsiigehtchic. From the last numbers I got from the Minister, it was $147,000. So if you tell me that services have gone down since division, I think that because we had a lot of small communities, we were part of Nunavut, there were 51 communities we were serving. We were able to accommodate 51 communities with regard to health care services before division, but it seems like after division, we’re at a situation where basically the so-called dollars expended to small communities has
depreciated to a point where that’s why you don’t have services, because it’s being spent in the larger centres to provide at those new hospitals or dementia centres or walk-in clinics or whatever you want to call them Those things are taking up dollars that should be expended in those small communities.
Mr. Chairman, I will give the Minister a copy of this. Maybe she can get her department to look at the cost breakdown of what we had prior to division and the expenditures we have today, so she can see for herself. I’ll give copies to several Members of small communities so we can see how exactly our services have depreciated to the point that they are not expending the same money as they were prior to division.