Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Lee.

Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the Member’s comments on that. This initiative is part of our Building Our Future Strategic Initiative Committee project and Ministers across departments and deputy ministers sit in this group. I will undertake to follow up on that evaluation suggestion and follow up with the Member on that.

I just want to add one more note about this Small Community Homelessness Funding. I take the Member’s point, but just going back to the history, those programs were set up precisely to address the needs of small communities that didn’t have shelters. I understand shelters are under, they are stretched and they are in need of more resources than what they get, but the Small Community Funding Program was set up to assist small communities because they just didn’t have any other resources. Thank you.

Just a quick follow-up on the Healthy Choices Program. I didn’t get from the Minister whether or not an evaluation has ever been done. I am presuming from her answer if she is following up, that no evaluation has been done. Could I get clarification on that, please?

My information is that is hasn’t been done and we will follow up and I will get back to the Member on timing of when that could be done. Thank you.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I wanted to ask the Minister in terms of community health programs, is the department looking at a comprehensive family program? We have a bunch of programs all over the place, and have they put together a unique northern, even an Aboriginal cultural family program, and yet in my seven years I haven’t really seen a family program come out of the communities in terms of treatment in terms of addiction, family violence or any type of abuse for the whole family. Is that something that we should be asking more forcefully in terms of putting family programs together? I want to ask the Minister in terms of what is really being done in the North, and if she can keep it brief.

Thank you, Yakeleya. Minister Lee.

Mr. Chairman, I don’t know how to be brief, so I am going to ask the deputy minister to give more detail, briefly. Thank you.

Ms. Meade.

Thank you, Ms. Meade. Mr. Yakeleya.

Mr. Chairman, I look forward to the review in the springtime and having some further discussions. I want to ask the Minister in terms of going forward in this area here, Mr. Chairman, it seems that we are spinning our feet here in terms of getting help for people in our communities. I recall an old lady in Colville Lake that talked about having a program on the land. It has been about seven years now since I have been in the Assembly. It is very difficult for this government to put a program on the land. We spend about $2 million a year in Nats’ejee K’eh and we see that every year we have a hard time putting drug and alcohol programs on the land. I wonder if we really are listening to the people.

Again, I come back to my same comments that I made before. Are we really listening to the people? They keep asking, can we get a program? We get these three-day programs, but we really need a strong program on the land that won’t cost much. It will save this department a lot of money, save the families a lot of money and certainly it will bring the families together. If we don’t show any type of leadership and motivation or some courage by taking the bull by the horn and putting a program out there...

Families do want to go out there, yet we are not there yet. We have to fight the bureaucracy and the system. I guess it is frustrating at times, but I am not going to give up yet on this notion of having on-the-land programs. I want to ask the Minister in terms of when the Minister does her review, will there really be emphasis to Aboriginal people like

the old lady in Colville Lake? Now that she is getting older, she is telling me it would be nice to have programs on the land. I wonder if the bureaucracy and the Department of Health and Social Services gets it. Are they still stuck on facilities like Nats’ejee’ Keh or mental health? It is the culture you are dealing with. The culture is being heavily influenced by a lot of things. We need to move in that area in the Health Promotion Program. We can save the communities a lot of money, but we are not. This is what the people are telling us. Why should they keep telling us what to do? We keep asking them, but it is just like we are spinning our feet and not listening to them. We need to move away from that, Mr. Chairman.

It has been seven years, and yet I haven’t seen a document that says this is how we are going to do the program on the land. I haven’t seen it. It is frustrating to sit on this side going back to the communities. You can work with families, children, fathers, everybody, but we have them all separate, even with the issue of residential school. It is right across the valley. Our jails are full with people that, for whatever reason, have put them there. People are killing themselves, young people. I talked about that earlier. Today we have homeless people. We have to give them hope and inspiration to do something. The only way that the elder told me -- and I believe the elder -- is if we have our system that supports to go on the land. That is the way I believe. But somehow our health programs don’t quite honour that or respect it. They give us lip service, but their actions are very weak when it comes down to actually doing it. I have experienced it with this department and other departments. Some departments are a little better than others, but can you really tell the old lady and the elders in Colville Lake we will now do a land program?

Now there are young boys in more trouble than ever because we haven’t helped them out. We need to listen to our people. Youth are asking for help. If there is a death in the community of close family, we tell them to get over it in three days and go to school, and they are expected to sit in school and deal with this emotion. We need to put them out somewhere where they will get good help. Mind you, this is only one part of the health programs that needs to be changed. I wonder if this department is big enough to make those kinds of changes and have faith. That is what I wanted to tell this department. I am not going to go over my wish list again because I could send them all what I said in the last seven years and ask them to follow up on some of those things. That is what I want to say, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Mr. Yakeleya. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m sure the Member wants me to be brief, so I’m going

to try to be brief. The Member is right that we spent $2 million at Nats’ejee K’eh but we also spent $6 million for the community counselling mental health program. That’s not to include the psychiatric unit and the heavy duty mental health work that goes on at the hospital. I understand the Member’s frustration, but what we are talking about is a huge demand. We have this huge need among a large portion of our population who needs mental health support, right up from psychiatric and most acute care that needs to be delivered in the hospital to what the community people want to do on the ground level and on-the-land programming.

The Member knows that we have provided funding for communities. We have provided funding for communities in the Sahtu as well. I know that the Sahtu Health Authority has provided funding for on-the-land programming. Granted, they’re not an established and consistent programming, but it is not the bureaucracy or the lack of will. It is that we are dealing with a massive, massive mental health and addictions challenge in the Northwest Territories.

I said we are reviewing the Mental Health Program, as I answered MLA Ramsay. We are going to come back to standing committee with the findings in April and May. In the meantime, I will be announcing the integration and some reorganizing of our mental health programming to improve the service in the interim. This is a huge challenge for us and there is just so much demand and stretching of the resources. This is the challenge.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We talked a little bit about community health programs yesterday. I didn’t have an opportunity to get into one of the subject matters that I consider to be very important in Tu Nedhe. That is the whole area of the issue with suicide in the small communities. I’d like to ask the Minister if there is anything significantly different in the sense of an increase of attention or programs or anything on suicide prevention in this budget compared to what was in the previous budget.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Ms. Lee.

No, we can’t say that we are substantially increasing the funding for suicide prevention.

I’m assuming that it would be a matter of the prevention and promotion services. In here it’s indicated that programs assist with emotional and social problems such as suicide, homelessness, and dealing with residential school issues. The majority of those, homelessness and residential school issues, are of course something that I recognize the department has to pay some

attention to. I know that it is difficult to address the homelessness issue because it’s difficult to find absolute homeless people in the small communities because relatives take them in and they end up becoming relative homeless people, which is an actual term. So there are people that don’t have their own home but kind of drift from home to home. It’s a difficult area to work in.

Suicide prevention, on the other hand, I think is something more emphasis has to be put into. I think it actually virtually devastates a family. Even it happened a handful of times in Tu Nedhe since I’ve been elected as MLA and I’ve seen the devastating impacts on the families. It’s an area that’s difficult to work in and a lot of people just don’t know how to deal with that area. The department has resources to maybe explore some options, explore some services outside of what’s available now and put some extra resources into this area in order to assist the families.

I don’t remember the program CBC runs on Friday afternoons. Edts’ula or something like that. Actually, they had a program on people that were affected by suicide. This particular individual spoke on there that had two incidents in the family and said that had they actually received some support in between, they may have saved the life of the second individual in their family that committed suicide. I guess one life is worth more than anything else that we hope to save in a budget. To that family, it’s not an issue of cost.

I guess, again, I’d like to know if there is no increase, then the department may feel that there is a sufficient amount of money and resources, human and otherwise, human and financial to address this area. I’d like to know if that’s the case, if the department feels that they have sufficient resources.

As I stated, there is no substantial increase to anything in our budget because it’s, as people have called it, a status quo maintenance kind of budget under our fiscal circumstance.

With respect to suicide prevention work, we are doing some new work under this initiative. We have obtained some funding with the Mental Health Commission, which is a body set up nationally, and we’ve been getting some money for the last couple of years. This year we will be flowing $460,000 in federal funding for community-based suicide prevention projects. One of the initiatives that we are embarking on is to set up an NWT Suicide Prevention Steering Committee. This committee will be made up of the Department of Health and Social Services, Education, Culture and Employment, MACA, Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority, Canadian Mental Health Association, and the national program Graduates and Trainers on Suicide Prevention, as well as Dene and Inuvialuit

community members. We are working also on, they call it Mental Health First Aid: Training the Trainers for the communities. That’s the initiative that we’re working on. We have also always had some programs under the National Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy and Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training, called ASIST, and those programs have been held in some of the communities as well. There’s not a substantial increase in the amount of money, but we are working on some initiatives to address this issue.

That’s good, actually. That sounds good, the money from the federal government. What is the plan to roll out the budget? Is it just filling budgets that are already at the community level or is this a little bit of new money? If so, what’s the communication strategy of the department to the small communities for this particular line item?

We’ll be floating this money into the authorities to work at the community level.

Does that mean that Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority will get the money for Fort Resolution and Lutselk’e?

I need to have my deputy minister give the information, as it’s operational.