Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on the questions asked by my colleague Mr. Bromley on how we can take a more

common sense approach to things which seem to have an obvious and simple answer, but because policy is strict and there isn’t a lot of latitude for discretion to be applied it makes it difficult to plead these cases.

The cases that Mr. Bromley refers to where we have students in southern Canada who need medical attention and because medical travel must originate in the Northwest Territories to be covered, the fact that these students couldn’t then access any kind of travel assistance even if it would be far less than what it would cost to come home and fly from here, but they can’t access any kind of support. It doesn’t make sense. Mr. Bromley clearly referred to it as a common sense approach.

We know, as a government, that we can’t have policies that have too much discretionary latitude attached to them because then we don’t have any way of controlling it and we don’t have any way of controlling costs and the whole thing can just go awry. But there must be a way.

I didn’t really hear anything very specific being responded from the Minister as to how we could deal with these sorts of things. I have a suggestion and I’d like to ask the Minister what she thinks of this. We need some kind of a person, a point of contact in the government, where people or MLAs, on behalf of constituents, could make a case for where the government needs to alter a policy in order for it to apply to a certain set of circumstances; somebody that the government trusts is not going to put the government at some kind of risk and somebody that will also be understanding and apply some common sense and discretion to the situation. I suggest some type of an ombudsman. I’ll ask the Minister, first, what would she respond to having somebody in the Department of Health with that kind of ability.