Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. The honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The goal of the Health and Social Services is to develop a midwifery program across the Territories wherever we feel that midwifery would fit well into the health care system.

I’d like to get some details on when this development would happen and why we need to redevelop it. My current understanding is it’s being implemented in Fort Smith. Why would it not be able to be implemented from the study they just completed?

In order to bring midwives into the system, we have to have a location for them to work from. We have to have midwives. We need the money to pay the midwives and a program that they will run that fits into the overall health system of the territory.

I don’t think we’re talking about anything that’s new here. I think they had midwives back several hundred years ago, so I’m not sure why the department’s taking so long in

implementing this type of thing. We’re not reinventing the wheel.

I’d like to ask the Minister about the funding that he’s talking about needing. I know, in the community of Hay River, we are trying to locate doctors. Are we able to use the funding for doctors currently to implement midwifery in some of these communities?

According to the report that we received, Hay River would be the next area that we expand for midwives at a cost of just under half a million dollars. After that, the report asks us to expand into the Beaufort-Delta at just under a million dollars and then the overall territorial program would be about $1.7 million. We have to be able to get all of that funding together before we launch into providing midwife services in areas. In addition to that, we are incorporating the ability for midwives who work into the new health centre in Hay River, and at this time, we don’t have a place for them to work out of.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final supplementary, Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister is leading into my next question. I understand the new facility in Hay River is being constructed as we speak. I would like to see the department implement this in a phased-in approach. If we have a new birthing room being designed in the new facility in Hay River, I’d like to see it implemented even in other communities where maybe we aren’t able to deliver the babies currently in those communities. But could we have the prenatal, could we have the post-delivery services provided in those communities sooner than later?

Although the program is not scheduled to begin until after we have the finances and after the health centre is finished sometime in 2014-2015, we are doing the planning activities for midwives for Hay River in 2013-2014. So the plan is that if it’s possible that we could do some pre-midwifery type of activities, then we will look at doing that.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, Mr. Moses.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yesterday in the House here, I had asked some questions on dealing with youth and the criminal activity that was going on. We got the reactive approach when I asked the Minister of Justice what they do when youth do go through the Criminal Code.

Today I want to take a little bit more of a proactive approach on that. I want to ask the Minister of

MACA as well as the Minister of Youth, what kind of activities and funding are available for youth throughout the Northwest Territories. Specifically, for the youth centres and friendship centres that deal with a lot of youth, after-school programs, evening programs, weekend programs, I’d like to ask the Minister of MACA what type of funding for these youth centres are available. How much is this funding and has that funding been reviewed?

Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, Mr. Robert McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Government of the Northwest Territories, back in the 16th Assembly, made a

commitment to increase youth funding throughout the Northwest Territories, and I think the youth today are benefitting from that. A lot of money was put into youth.

As far as the youth centres go, it used to be $250,000. In 2007-2008 we had 18 applicants. Again, thanks to the efforts of the Members of the 16th Assembly, that money was increased to

$500,000. As of last year we had 35 applicants for the $500,000.

In the communities, especially the remote communities that have a hard time getting supplies or have to pay high utility costs, $500,000 over 35 projects doesn’t go too far.

Can the Minister specifically let me know, out of those 35 organizations that receive funding, how much did each organization get? Thank you.

Each friendship centre received $14,285 to go towards assisting with their youth centres.

Fourteen thousand dollars in Yellowknife might get you a lot of supplies and materials for youth to attend after school programs, but up in communities like Sachs Harbour, Inuvik and Fort McPherson, those dollars don’t travel very far. I was in a meeting in Inuvik with Ingamo Hall. They talked about lack of programs and funding, and competing for funding dollars.

I want to ask the Minister, is he willing to review the amount of funding going towards the youth centres and youth-serving organizations, to look at possibly another increase so that these communities can benefit and get a little bit more funding to run the programs and keep the kids into healthy, educated programs?

We’re always looking at reviewing the programs we offer and the amount of funding they’re getting. We’re quite pleased that we’ve had so many applicants for the money that we have out there. It’s an ongoing review and we would have a look at it every year. Obviously, if there’s any talk of an increase, it would have to go

through committee and it would have to go through the whole budget process.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have 35 organizations that are competing for community dollars to run programs. We only have 33 communities in the Northwest Territories. How is the Minister and his department working with these organizations to get them to work together so that dollars can be spent more effectively and efficiently, so that they’re not competing for dollars and that they’re working together to develop programs for the youth of the Northwest Territories?

We always want to be sure that our youth centres are offering programs that the youth can take advantage of. We have a couple of communities where they may have two youth centres. We’d like to see them all work together. I think at the end of the day, though, the ultimate goal is to provide some programming for youth, and with the territory being so spread out, a lot of these smaller communities can collaborate on offering programs for youth. They all have their own stand-alone youth centres. But again, it’s always one that we would like to monitor and see how we can best improve our service to them and their service to the youth.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The issue of housing has always come up every time I’ve gone into the Sahtu communities. There are many challenges and there have been many discussions over the past nine years I’ve been a Member of the Legislative Assembly, about getting people into houses. Specifically, just last week I had a meeting with the leadership of Deline and they talked about the challenge of getting people into those houses in their community.

I want to ask the Minister, is he or his department or the Cabinet looking at ways that they could get people into these units, either own them or to get them into public units? Because we seem to be running up a brick wall on how to get people into houses, especially this time of year with winter coming. Is the Minister doing a housing review?

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We just had the shelter policy review that was completed. We had gone into all the communities and looked into the housing situation

in the communities. Our goal is to try and get people into public housing or home ownership. I think we’ve made a lot of inroads into making it easier for people to access some of these programs. We still need a lot of people out there to step up to the plate and accept their responsibility. That way we can form a partnership instead of just having the Housing Corporation responsible for everything.