Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I also join my colleagues today in talking about elder abuse. I’m sorry to say that elder abuse does go on in our country and does exist in the Northwest Territories.
Elders are the maturity and wisdom of our nation and it’s appalling for me to hear some of the stories of abuse that go on behind closed doors. We hear of stories of physical and emotional abuse and these things truly upset us. I was going to tell the same story that was just cited so recently in the news that Mr. Ramsay has cited. I’m not going to speak to that.
I’d like to look for tangible and practical ways of how we individually in our lives can reach out. Mr. Bromley touched on Building Networks. I think that’s very important. How many times do we sit down to a family dinner at Christmas or Thanksgiving or sometime a year and do we have our minds trained on the fact that perhaps there is a senior out there who is away from family and friends that we could set an extra place at our table for?
When my son was married about 10 years ago, a post-war family friend of my father’s showed up for the wedding unexpectedly. His name was Grandpa Ken. My father had since passed away. We invited Grandpa Ken to come and stay with us for a few days. He stayed for four years. You might remember him. You would see him around Yellowknife sometimes wearing placards. He wasn’t the most politically correct person in the world. Grandpa Ken did stay with us for four years and our kids were accustomed to the fact that when there was something going on in our family, it was time to run down to the Harbour House and pick up Grandpa Ken. I do apologize to those people. He was a retired pastor. Some of the people who stayed in the Harbour House got an unexpected sermon or two when they stayed there, so I do apologize for that. He was eccentric but beautiful and we loved him. It was an opportunity.
Not everybody can do that, what I just stated, but I bet you there are many times when we can reach out, build a friendship, make a connection to a senior in the community. My children did not have the advantage of growing up with their grandparents nearby. My father was in Ontario. So we can look at other people and think that could be your father, that could be their grandfather, and when those people may need at a time when they come into a difficult time in their life, how wonderful it would be for them to have a family that they were connected to.
We have programs like Big Brother and different things that try to link people in the communities. I think this is something we could extend to the elders community, as well, and we could all be on the lookout for opportunities where we could network with and reach out and be a servant to those who are our seniors.