Thank you, Minister Lee. Next on my list, Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Under prevention and promotion I notice a significant increase, about $541,000 to that area. I’m wondering if I can get a breakout of how there are six subjects listed for those dollars: early childhood development, homelessness, family violence, tobacco, in-house respite services and health promotion activities. Is it possible to break those dollars out by those six activities, the additional $541,000 we’re putting into those activities? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With that money we envision creating four family home visitors centres, two in the Deh Cho and two in Beau-Del. This is for the development and delivery of early intervention initiatives which will promote the development of a strength-based, solution-focused, family-centred delivery of support services. Specifically trained support workers who will work with families to optimize the home environment for the health and physical, mental and emotional well-being of children and families. This initiative is similar to the current Healthy Families Program model, which focuses on the age group of birth to five years. Thank you.

I just want to say I’m very pleased to see that modest increase. It’s more than doubling of the budget to date but, obviously, that budget to date I see as quite inadequate. I want to compliment the department on getting that commitment and allocation in there. Are these internal dollars or is the source of these dollars federal? Thank you.

It’s government money. It’s not federal funding. It’s part of the strategic initiative investment and Building our Future. Thank you.

Thank you to the Minister for those remarks, Mr. Chairman, and kudos on that.

I have one other question on the additional $960,000 put into community services. On the next page, still under this budget item, I just wondered if I can get a little more information on how those dollars are being allocated within the social work, mental health and addiction workers; if there’s a focus in one particular area or another with those dollars. Thank you.

We believe it’s just a Collective Agreement increase. There is no enhancement in the programming. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Lee. Next on my list is Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On page 8-31, non-government organizations residential care, the…

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. We’re not on page 8-31. Let’s conclude and then I’ll come back to you for 8-31. We’re on page 8-30. Any more questions on 8-30? We’re on Health and Social Services, activity summary, community health programs, grants and contributions, contributions. Is committee agreed?

Now we’ll move to 8-31. Sorry, Mr. Beaulieu. I just wanted to make sure we were on the right page. Next on my list, Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is all one section and the previous question was just on 8-31. Okay. Anyway, my question is still the same. On page 8-31, the non-government organization residential care, the drug and alcohol programs and services related to addictions. There is a slight increase there and also there are increases for support workers, for addictions workers and so on. My question is: is the department making any sort of shift towards the addiction works on the land? That seems to be a real, real big item for the small communities. It’s pretty well a feeling among the addictions workers there that that would be something that might work best of all. A lot of people actually talk about that, and this is, I guess, the area where there could be huge benefits to it.

I had talked about this previously and made a Member’s statement. I talked about it maybe under another section, but here seems to be the appropriate time to maybe have the department look at making a shift away from what they’re doing and then putting more money into what they are doing and doing something different that will work, because what they’re doing really isn’t showing results. I’m not sure if the department keeps results on successes, like, for example, in treatment centres, people that go to treatment centres, like, are they successful and what determines success. Is it being sober for five years? Is it one year? Is it life and how do they know? I mean, all of those things, right? It’s a difficult thing to determine. What the people are seeing is that soon after the types of residential treatment, I suppose, that’s being offered to people in the small communities, they’re back to practising alcohol use again. I’m curious, I guess, in this area if there would be actually a shift away from the standard and into something that the communities want. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. I apologize for cutting you off there; 8-30 and 8-31 are one section, so I apologize for that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That’s not part of the budget we have here, but the Member has raised that before and I committed to him last week that we will revisit that. It would take major changes, actually, because most of this money is already... That $2.931 million, most of it is going to, well, all of it is going to Nats’ejee Keh, Salvation Army and Tree of Peace. That’s the budget. If we want to use that money to do something different, it would take, you know, changes in doing things, but I think we need to look at that. I’ve committed to the Member that we will do that, and we need to do that with an eye towards the next business plan.

That’s good, Mr. Chairman. This is what I had the idea that it was going to provide service in those areas, places that were just

mentioned by the Minister, and what happens in that case is the majority of that treatment and that care is provided to people, and I recognize that people from all the small communities also end up here in Yellowknife, but it is provided to the folks, most of the folks here in YK.

There’s really nothing more that I can add other than it’s good to see that if they’re going to look at something like this in the future to shift away from this type of care that they have in place now, that doesn’t really seem to be effective to maybe trying something different at the community level, I think that would have many positive aspects to it, even right into the economy of a small community in the sense of jobs and retaining some of the money there, having them deal with their own addiction issues in the community and trying to address those at the community level. Like I said, it appears as though on-the-land treatment is something that many of the Aboriginal MLAs in here have been asking for and something that I think the department has to really take a serious look at. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, we need to look at that. I have committed to look at that. It will take a different way of thinking to be able to re-profile enough money to do it territorial-wide. It is really about closing the gap in the spectrum of services available. We have residential programming. We send people away. We have staff that work in the communities. But I take the Member’s point that we don’t have enough options for communities to tap into to do on-the-land healing programs. We do fund them, but it’s on an ad hoc basis and a project-by-project basis and whether we could get some money from the feds or some other... It is sort of like we look for wherever we could find it, but I believe what the Member is saying is that we have to develop that as a program with base funding and stable funding and program guidelines. It is something that I have committed to look at it and we will look at it in the next cycle. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Lee. We are on Health and Social Services, activity summary, community health programs, grants and contributions, total $69.2 million.

Okay. We are moving on to page 8-32 and Health and Social Services, information item, community health programs, active positions.

We will move along to page 8-33, which is also an information item, Health and Social Services, details of funding allocated to health and social services authorities.