Madam Chair, I have some questions I’m going to give to the Minister and get some response to my questions. I have two more questions.

Why are there two budgets, one for the air carrier and one for the medical service when other organizations can provide a service that accounts for both in the pricing? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. One is an air carrier and one is for personnel services to support the air ambulance flights and so on. For a more detailed reason on why there are two separate contracts, I’d like to ask the deputy minister to provide a response.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Ms. DeLancey.

Thank you, Ms. DeLancey. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I look forward to some of the rationale and to see where we go from there.

I want to ask the Minister, in light of the recent attention that the Sahtu is receiving with the oil and gas exploration activities and the number of workers coming into the region, when we’re looking at medevacs, it seems logical that a community

such as Norman Wells would serve the Sahtu region and would be more stabilized in terms of medevacs for our region.

I want to ask the Minister, when the evaluation is being looked at, that the community of Norman Wells or the Sahtu is the hotspot or it could be with this type of service. Is that something the Minister is going to consider other than the pricing of this service? We’re looking at services now for the Sahtu region.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are going to look at actuals on all of the medevac flights as we roll out the new RFP. The new request for proposals will have that type of information to support the RFP so that individuals who are bidding on the contract and companies that are bidding on the contract will know what is required of them, where the majority of the flights will be originating from. Definitely, if there is the exploration activity in the Sahtu, it nets a lot of additional medevac flights out of the Sahtu, then that would form part of the RFP and that would be considered in the evaluation of the RFPs.

I’m looking forward to the actuals in the evaluation. We’re looking at the quality of medical services in our community. I wanted to ask the Minister on the monitoring of how many medevacs, and the Minister said he would look at the actuals. How many medevacs in the community for each month, is it monthly, seasonal, or annually? How we are measuring ourselves? Right now there’s one carrier that does all the medevacs in the Northwest Territories. How do we measure that in terms of services? They might be quite busy; they might be doing a really good job. I’m not too sure.

Like I said, there are people in my region who said we could work together. Not one company can have everything. That puts us against them. That’s not fair. There are other airline companies that can also do the work, and they are up to the challenge. This is an opportunity to work together. I want to ask the Minister in terms of the trend of monitoring this medevac contract.

We do get monthly reports from the current provider. There is a requirement within the current contract for that information to be gathered by the contractor and provided to our department.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. I’m just going to call the page again, and then I have Mr. Bromley. Health and Social Services, operations expenditure, directorate, $8.599 million. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to follow up on a couple of my colleagues’

questions. Just on this most recent one, I know the Minister is aware of my thoughts on this. I was disappointed that the contract didn’t go out for RFP when it came due and that there was a decision made to extend that. I don’t know if there was an additional cost to that or not.

I think one of the issues that we’re raising is often we have small airlines that are based in our smaller communities, but without support they’re not able to maintain their services like they would otherwise be able to. Of course, since they’re already there, the service is better, the potential service is considerably greater. I don’t have any questions. I think my colleague Mr. Yakeleya asked the questions there, but I do want to underscore the same concern. I’ll look forward to this coming out in April and see what we can do on that front.

I also wanted to follow up on Ms. Bisaro’s question. I note under grants and contributions there is a difference of $70,000, and that is explained on the following page with a review of the Integrated Service Delivery Model that was done by the Hay River authority. Here it says that review was completed. My two questions are: Are we talking about the same review, or was this a separate review than the one that the Minister and Ms. Bisaro talked about? And can the Minister encapsulate the results of what was the main message we learned from that review?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess I wasn’t clear on this. The review portion of the ISDM is complete. Right now the doctor that we have hired is doing the clinical services plan to develop or to upgrade or amend, I guess, the Integrated Service Delivery Model.

What I’m hearing is the review was completed, as stated on page 14, and in actual fact what is coming due in August this year is the clinical services plan, which takes off from the results of the review and addresses it, and that would be brought before committee. Am I correct there?

Yes, that is correct.

I think I will leave it at that. I am interested in results, but committee is there to deal with that. I’ll look forward to that.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Anything further on page 8-13, Health and Social Services, activity summary, directorate, operations expenditure summary, $8.599 million?

Page 8-14, Health and Social Services, activity summary, directorate, grants and contributions, $35,000.

Page 8-15, Health and Social Services, information item, directorate, active positions. Mr. Moses.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to ask the Minister, in terms of under the territorial health services division, if he’s got a plan in place for the oral health care, such as dental health for some of the smaller communities that don’t have those services, and if he would be willing to commit to having a more ongoing presence in the smaller communities, such as possibly creating some type of mobile dental unit.

Dental care services that are needed for some of the dental care in the small communities are not being addressed, and in some cases our dental hygienists are only going in for a day and coming out and not providing the proper services or quality of services to the small communities. I’d just like to see where the Minister is at with that.