Thank you, Madam Chair. As indicated by the Minister of the Housing Corporation, Joe Greenland should be ready this summer or towards the end of this summer, for allocation of those units to the elders in Aklavik. Our deputy is working with the president of the Housing Corporation on trying to build or renovate these places and build these places for elders to live in and provide assisted living from our department. We’re prepared to do that in Joe Greenland, so that we support the elders that will be moving in there.
As MLA Blake said, when we use the term long-term care, then we say, well, we can’t afford the four and a half nurses that are required to run a long-term care of this magnitude. They’re saying
don’t call it long-term care. What we need is for the adults who live there, have some nursing support, home care support, security support and so on. So we are working with Housing to try to achieve that over there.
In Fort McPherson, the community indicated that one of their major needs was for us to increase the physical accessibility to the current senior citizens home and also provide an elders daycare. So a lot of the individual families are taking care of their own elders in the community and they want to be able to work. So they want us to set up working with the Housing Corporation, because it is their facility, to have an elders daycare in that facility and have a washroom that is accessible for the elders, easy for the elders daycare workers to be able to assist the elders in that home. So that is something that we want to work with the Housing Corporation on achieving in those two communities.