Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll take the Member’s point, but I think it is really hard to get an accurate comparison to take one part out of the government’s budget, say from 1986 or something, and compare it to ours unless we used the same indicators. So I just want to say, modern medicine and health care have changed so we need to know what is included there. People in Tsiigehtchic, they are connected to roads which is different than some of the other communities in the Territories who are not connected by the road and they still get fly-in nursing service.
Mr. Chairman, I understand his objective, which is to enhance nursing coverage and other health care coverage, and actually services to a small community like Tsiigehtchic. I understand that. I want to tell him that I am committed to work with him to do that. I am glad that he said that a nursing service doesn’t have to be 100 percent nurses, because you understand that a community could need a lot of things. They need a wellness worker, they need a mental health and addictions person, maybe they need a community organizer. We understand that we can’t have six, seven, eight, nine, 10, perhaps, people doing all of it separately in a small town, but that is exactly what Foundation for Change is trying to do. We are trying to find efficiencies as a system, because we believe there is a better way to address, a better way in which we spend our health care and social services dollars, so that we could refocus on the communities and do community wellness work and say, okay, what does a community like Fort McPherson or Tsiigehtchic need, and have a dialogue with the community.
If you look at the Foundation for Change plan, that is part of our plan, because we understand more and more that we are going to have less nurses and doctors and other people there to recruit, but that doesn’t mean that our people don’t need that
service. So we need to find ways to see how we can serve our communities better. That is part of our plan and, in the meantime, we are continuing to work on how to enhance nursing coverage and try to create a team of providers in a community like Tsiigehtchic, and that is our plan. Thank you.