Thank you, Mr. Chair. First off I just want to welcome the Minister and his staff here and just let him know that I do appreciate the hard work and the dedication that this department has to the health and well-being in providing the services and programs to the people of the Northwest Territories.
I do know it’s a challenge. With all the challenges that we face in the remote communities and the high cost of living that we have in the Northwest Territories as well, you try to do the best with what you have.
That said, there are challenges and there are concerns that I bring from my constituents of the community of Inuvik, but also from the territory as a whole. In one of my previous jobs, I had the opportunity to travel to every community in the Northwest Territories and regardless of what the job was, I’d always make it a thing to do and go visit the health care centres and just do a little quick tour, introduce myself to the nurses and see what challenges they were facing. Now that I’m in this position, we can start addressing some of those issues and offering our support to the Minister and his department.
Some of the comments that the Minister had made yesterday, I just wanted to highlight a couple of things. Doing some good work. One of the things that was mentioned was providing speech and language therapy to children in the community schools. I know it’s very high, I’m not sure what the stats are, but they are exceeding what is probably expected. So there’s a lot of work going in there. That said, it allows us to look at other departments on how we can start putting efforts and money and resources into early childhood development, and I’m not talking kindergarten, Grade 1; we’re looking at zero to three, zero to four, right up to the ages of six, seven, eight. When they get to kindergarten, we can’t forget that those are critical years in their lives and the sooner we start, the better results we will continue to see.
I’m glad to see that there’s the Mental Health and Addictions Plan. What I hope to see in that is the long-term plans and also immediate action on what has been said in previous reports, reports that go back however long. We’re going to consult and continue discussions when we already know some of the main obstacles, main challenges that are right in our face, right on our front doorstep. Yet we’re going to continue to consult. We need action on those, immediate action for critical problems that we face right now in the Northwest Territories. Then, as we continue, we can develop a longer strategy looking at somewhere like a 10-year-plan. I know we’ve had a couple discussions here with some of the other departments where they develop a 10-year plan. It would be nice to have this department follow suit with such a critical area. As we know, mental health and addictions are our biggest cost-driver in the Department of Health and Social Services.
Prevention and promotion. We could deal with a lot of problems. It is a priority of this government. However, when I look through the budget plan, I do see a decrease in prevention and promotion and I
think that needs to be addressed. We need to find better dollars where we can educate the people of the Northwest Territories and create awareness on some of the issues that impact us. This is where it starts, right here at our budget planning and our business planning.
As our seniors population increases and gets older, I do see status quo in the budget where no monies have changed, but each year we’re getting a higher increase of population. To make it worse, there was that two-year period, maybe even more, where a lot of our seniors had to wait for hip replacement therapy, joint replacement therapy. So in those two years their health declined and now there’s going to be increased costs of rehabilitation services to get our seniors back into living an independent lifestyle. For those that we fail to do that for, we’re going to need more funding into long-term care centres as these injuries which might have a longer lasting effect where they can’t live independently at home. This just continues spiraling downward. It has an impact on the family, an impact on the homes, on the communities as well.
I see that there’s also a decrease in the population health budget, which I wasn’t very pleased to see, as they do a lot of the community work in terms of evaluating programs, getting out to the communities and some of our programs that we see at the regional community level. Once we get into detail, I’ll get into more questions regarding that and maybe ask why decisions were made to take money out of such critical programs that allow our people to live healthy lifestyles.
There’s also the concern of the deficits that we have in two of our regional health authorities, how we impact that when we have good authorities who are doing good work, but making a policy where because they’re doing a good job, we’re taking monies from them and putting it into the regional centres. Obviously, the regional health authority that I’m from in Inuvik, it does get affected and we do have a deficit, and I appreciate that we get the money from other regional health authorities, but it doesn’t allow those regional health authorities to flourish, to continue to do better programs for their regions. There’s got to be a better way to manage those.
I’ll just make a comment that I know we did have discussions earlier in this government with the Minister and his staff to create a Beaufort-Delta regional advisory committee for our health authority. It wouldn’t be a board, but it would be an advisory committee where they’d give some direction or discuss our major issues and that would get representation from the community levels. As much as I represent our region, I’m also here representing the territory as a whole, and that needs to be reflected in Fort Smith, Fort Simpson, the Sahtu, North Slave and here in Yellowknife, as
well, and it can’t be just directed to one community. How we find that out, how we do that, that’s something we have to discuss. It’s a territorial initiative that we’ve got to continue to move on.
The Family Violence Act, Ms. Bisaro discussed that earlier, but it is a growing concern in our communities and there needs to be something done to address that. We can go through phase 1, phase 2, make some good momentum, but we cannot shelve phase 3. We’ve got to make sure that all the work that’s been done by previous governments, previous leaders, previous staff does not fall on the wayside and that we continue to take their work and move forward.
I’d like to say I was glad to see that there was also the funding for $36 million to fund facilities in their replacements and their renovations. As we go forward with the building planning, that the buildings and the way they’re planned accommodates what we need: detox centre, detox rooms, psychiatric spaces, long-term care facilities and it’s not just for patients.
Another one that’s addressed, and where we’ve had the report and have had discussions with constituents as well as very interested and concerned members in the Northwest Territories, is the Midwifery Program. The sooner the better that we could get that on, we would take some pressure off of our physicians, but it also gives families, expectant mothers a great opportunity to have a healthy birth from conception to birth and show them the support that they need, especially in our small communities. That’s where they don’t always get a chance to see physicians or be able to attend certain programs.
Like I said, I do appreciate the hard work that this department does, based on the challenges, the high cost of living, the facilities, the lack of physicians in some of the communities. I appreciate the hard work that they’re doing and the dedication that they have. The reality is we do have challenges and we’ve got to work on addressing those.
I appreciate that the Minister and his staff for coming and listening to what we’re going to have to say today. Thank you, Mr. Chair.