Thank you, Mr. Chair. My comments will focus on the Sahtu region and the impacts of health on the department here, and the system we have operating right before us. I want to ask the Minister, when we go through the Health department, with regard to the communities that have some basic services like the community of Colville Lake, which I represent. Today we have a nurse visit there once a week. We have people in Colville Lake who are trained at a minimum level for administering pills or just looking after aches, pains and bruises. So I want to ask about the fairness and the protection of our people. When is the department going to be putting in some plans for basic health care services in Colville Lake, Tsiigehtchic, Wrigley? I want to know how many communities don’t have a nursing station/centre. I want to ask that. How is the department going to start taking care of the people who do not have the basic nursing stations in their communities? How are you going to look at some of the plans that are required, as Mr. Bromley talked about? It’s not an infrastructure budget, but we need to look at those things in our small communities.

I want to say to the Minister that I’ve looked over the budget and I’ve wanted to make some comments on the health and prevention. The Minister has embarked on community fact-finding on addictions and alcohol and drugs in the Northwest Territories. We do have a treatment centre right across the lake here called Nats'ejee K'eh that runs a 28-day program. From the numbers we receive, it’s operated under $2 million. They run a program which is almost 45 percent filled to capacity. When you do the numbers, it costs roughly about $14,800 for a client to take a 28-day program. I want to ask the Minister if we could change that to make better use of the efficiency and effectiveness of one of our government’s priorities. I think the Minister is doing this through this addictions forum. I am 150 percent supportive of this initiative. However, that forum comes back with strong recommendations to look at community-based healing and how we manage the program at Nats'ejee K'eh as an educational program. Combine that with healing programs in our regions and I think we have a good combination.

There should be a place where people can go to a centre and learn about the harmful effects of alcohol and drugs at the abuse level and know what the harmful effects will do to families, communities, and have them look at skill development, really take a look at it. Combine that in our regions with healing programs and skill development. I’m looking forward to that.

I do want to say that the other part is the amount of dollars that we are going to be looking at. The Minister has put some money in for supporting youth and community members on prevention programs. I think that’s something that resonated with some of my people in the Sahtu. They said that if we’re going to drink, we’re going to drink. We’re of an age that nobody is going to tell us anything different. Well, okay. But what they did say was we have to start educating our youth. So I’m glad there’s money being set aside to educate our youth. It might take a generation. Our people are 51 percent of the population. The communities I represent are a high population of Aboriginal people. We’ve got to bring them out of the despair, depression and hopelessness, and not use that number one pain killer, which is alcohol. We’ve got to give them some incentive to live a good life. The high cost of living is almost double what you pay in Yellowknife. The employment rate is low. People who live there work on seasonal wages. The employment rate in Norman Wells is 80 percent. Some of the larger centres are working pretty good, but in our small communities the unemployment rate is very high and the cost of living is very high.

So it looks pretty bad when you look at our communities, pretty desperate. We need to really work on our people.

Mr. Chair, if I want to ask the Minister, and I’m probably going to ask him right now, if we were to do a Sahtu health report card, I wonder what it would look at. If you had an independent consultant go into the Sahtu and do a health report card, what would it say about our health conditions? Just as if we go to the doctor and we say, “What’s up, doc? How’s my health?” For regular checkups, the doctor will tell us about some of the conditions. What about our mental health report card? Again, when we go through tough times, when you go through stressful times or when bad things happen to our people, what about our emotional checkups? Close friends and family die, or painful family issues happen from time to time, or when we feel hurt or pain and don’t know what to do with it, we turn to something that will take care of these emotional hard times, which is usually alcohol and drugs. Then we learn that’s what takes care of emotional pain.

Lastly, what about our spiritual health? When you look at it from an Aboriginal perspective, you look at the four components of a human being. You’ve got a lot of issues that we can talk about, but then I’m asking the Minister you have close to 65 percent of the people at Stanton Territorial Hospital are Aboriginal and you have a community like Fort Good Hope who has, in their traditional foods, about 76 percent of them eat traditional foods. Are we meeting that in our hospitals? That’s the food we grew up on. How do we take care of them?

We have 28 percent of families in Fort Good Hope who make less than $30,000 a year while the GNWT has 16.7 percent of that. Do you see the picture I’m painting? We’ve got to get back to some of the basics. That’s what I’m asking this Minister. We need basic health services first, start with nurses in our communities. Get them in our communities. That’s one of our priorities and we’re not meeting it.

Mr. Chair, thank you very much. I’ll have questions for the Minister as we go through the detail.