Mr. Chairman, the response from the Minister, I’m having a hard time accepting it. I know that’s part of life, I guess, when you get into a relationship. You know, the husband or the wife wants to move here or stay there. However, I don’t know if that’s one of the requirements of this government here or this department here hiring social workers or our nurses. I mean, that’s part of life. I hope the Minister will be big enough to see that the whole community needs one of our workers in that community and to tell the community of Tulita because of our social worker is now in a relationship, so it’s pretty hard for this social worker now to be away from their spouse. Well, that really doesn’t give much weight in terms of not serving over 500 people, or 400 people.
I just want to ask the Minister if she can have a little more heart than that and to look at the big picture here in terms of serving our people’s needs in this area here, because right now it shows very little heart in her answers. I want to ask again, put the challenge there to the Minister and the fine staff that she’s leading, in terms of making something work for our community.
It’s been three years, Mr. Chair, and we’ve got seven more months in this term here. After that it will be four years that we don’t have a social worker in our community. People are not really feeling confident, I guess, in some of the areas that we do. I think that I need to push the health board and push the Minister’s staff to provide better action
plans to have a social worker in our community. It’s something that we need to show.
I want to ask the Minister if she’s up to the challenge to put somebody physically in Tulita. I want to make that known to the House here, that after awhile I tend to say, well, I don’t know if I should bring it up anymore because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I’m always hearing reasons why we don’t have it.
Again, I know the resources out there are tight and the challenges are difficult. However, that’s why we’re in this position: to make things happen and to serve people in our communities. I hear social workers, from time to time when I travel in the Sahtu, off the record, that talk to me, and some of them are pretty tired, but they don’t want to say too much because they don’t want to get in trouble. They tell me that we certainly need somebody dedicated in our communities. They are working really hard and they are hardworking people but we need to do more. We need to do something quick to help our communities.
This is only one issue under the chapter here. I want to ask the Minister again if she would provide some concrete direction to our health board and for the person to be located into the community of Tulita. There are other areas in the Sahtu. I have five communities she needs to work with and this is only one community. I’ve got four more and my time is running out so I’ll have to use some other time to look at some of the issues elsewhere. Thank you, Mr. Chair.