I appreciate the Minister’s reply and his concern about deficit spending and potential bankruptcy in other jurisdictions. I would, though, like to make mention that budgets invoke change in policy. Budgets provide ladders of opportunity. I believe that we have a huge amount of opportunity that is still not being tapped into in the Territories. We have crumbling infrastructure. We’ve got maximum capacity. In fact, we’ve got overcapacity subscribed. If we pick our Stanton Territorial Hospital, for example, this hospital was designed for 10,000 visits per year. We know this hospital is now at 20,000 visits per year. They are working out of closets. In fact, they don’t even have room for closets anymore because they’ve been used for all different sorts of service oriented work.
I’m concerned. We’ve got no nurses in the communities. We’ve heard that time and time again here in this House. We’ve got concerns with long-term care facilities, long-term care beds as our aging population is bestowed upon us. We’ve got issues with home care. Again, keeping people in our homes as long as we can, especially in our small communities. I’m really concerned that as much as we want to look at fiscally tightening and
battening down the hatches and controlling the economic levers for our success, our spending on health care has not kept up with the times and has not kept up with the demands of the Northwest Territories. The residents demand more. I think the residents need to hear a future in health care spending. I’m not saying 42 cents of every dollar needs to be the magic number but, believe me, the current flow of 24.8 cents of our dollar being spent in this budget does not equate or fit the means of what we’re seeing provincially, and I think there’s a huge opportunity going forward.