Excellent. There’s still a little bit of time on the clock too. Thanks for that. That’s all good information. I’m happy to hear that. There are some areas that I don’t hear much talk about and I’d like to hear a little bit more from the Minister or the deputy minister on this area.

Under this area we have hospital services and NWT health centres. Now, there’s certainly one thing that crosses over that, and that is nurses. We need nurses in hospitals and we need nurses in health centres. There’s still an international and national shortage of nurses in the country and around the globe, and as a result, we have in the past had significant use of agency nurses where we hire the nurses that are identified by the agencies, we pay them a salary based on our Collective Agreement, but then we also pay a finder’s fee to the agencies who happen to have identified the nurses. I’ve seen those rates and they range anywhere from $90 a day to $450 a day.

I’m curious how many agency nurses that fall under this category were used in 2010-11. Actually, you know what I want? I want the department to give me a summary for the last five years on agency nurse usage, how many agency nurses we’ve utilized, how much we paid in salary, but also how much we’ve paid in the top-up, the fee to the agencies. I also want a bit of a summary on nurses that we’ve hired as locums or backfill in community health centres and the hospital over that same period. Those are the ones that we hire as employees that we don’t go through an agency, and there are some that we have in our own relief pool, I know that too. Can I get those two breakdowns so we get a bit of a sense of what this backfill is costing us?

The reason I’m bringing it up is I think that’s an area where we need to find some efficiencies. Agency nurses are just really expensive and a necessary evil now, but what are we doing to break that dependence from the agencies? I think that could save us some money that we can reprofile back in, but also creating some stability in the communities with respect to community health nurses.

Now, we had a really great program, in my opinion, Community Health Nurse Development Program, which wasn’t used in 2010-11, or at least to the capacity I think it could. What are our plans for those types of programs in the future? I think those should be expanded as opposed to cut back. If we truly want to get northern nurses back into the communities, we better make sure they have the skills to go in there. So I want some information on that as well.

And while we’re here, once again, just go back to Hansard and re-read everything I said on broadband because I think it fits this section as well. So I want some statistics on what the agency nurses are costing us, what our locum nurses are costing us, and what we’re doing and what our plan is to transition away from our reliance on this model when we’re training nurses at Aurora College and we’re having larger and larger grad classes. What are we doing to break the model of our dependence on agencies and locums?