Thank you, Madam Chair. I’ll add more to the Canadian Blood Service, blood and plasma protein products. The Canadian Blood Service is a non-profit, charitable organization that provides blood and blood supply products to Canadians. However, Health Canada is responsible for regulating the blood supply system. The high cost of this item really is, like the Minister of Finance indicated, it’s actually just two people, believe it or not, which consume a large part of this budget. Plasma protein products, there are only two people using that product and it resulted in a shortfall. The costs, the blood in 2010-11 is $1.7 million which resulted in almost $1.967 million shortfall. The total cost to the Canadian Blood Service in this actual cost was projected costs in 2011-12 for the rest of this year is $2.7 million. Again, that resulted in a shortfall of $1.97 million. The budget for this product is only $743,000. It is just the actual cost that is needed to provide blood to keep these individuals alive.
Authority deficits are attributed to several factors including historical funding levels and have not kept pace with the cost drivers and/or even inflation. The two authorities, as indicated by the Minister of Finance, are the two authorities that have hospitals. At this time although we are constantly reviewing the costs, we haven’t changed the funding models of the authorities so that some of the authorities do all come out with surpluses every year and then these two that have the hospitals do have deficits.
We are looking at trying to develop a long-term solution by amending authority funding to address these structural deficits at this time. At this time, what happens often is that clients are sent from a housing authority to the hospital. The hospital here or the hospital in Inuvik will pick up the cost for that client, so the client could be from another authority but ends up in one of the hospitals. The cost is picked up also.
In addition to that, the medical travel has been transferred to Stanton. Each time there is medical travel, a solution for the various health and social services authorities would be to put the individual on medical travel, so if he ends up here and then further on to Edmonton, then Stanton picks up that cost. Stanton also has that additional issue of dealing with the medical travel and that also runs into a deficit. I don’t have the actual number, but $3 million worth of deficit in medical travel comes to mind. Again, that is a result from all of the authorities and all of the clients right across the North that do need medical travel.
The residential southern placement of children, this is children who are… We have contractual obligations for children to receive services in the residential facilities that are in the South. Right now we have 49 children that are in residential southern facilities. That is a cost of over almost $5.3 million to house and provide service. The clients that are placed in southern residential facilities for various reasons range from long-term placements for lifelong disabilities to short-term placements for treatment or transitional programs related to mental health disorders and behavioural problems. There is quite a range there of some of the children on this list are there basically on a permanent basis; some are there and they will come back. The hope is that there wouldn’t be a lot of short-term treatment and sometimes there is a lot of short-term treatment. That number goes up. Like I said, the cost of that exceeded the budget by $1 million that the Member is seeing. Thank you.