Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, this is a concern that is shared among all three of our territories, especially in areas where dental services are not readily available. We are having a harder and harder time to recruit dental therapists because the dental therapy school in Prince Albert was shut down.

Under the Territorial Health System Sustainability Initiative, THSSI, there is a pot of money that is set aside for pan-territorial initiatives. We did propose with the other territories a co-operative project to hire staff. NWT will be the lead to look at developing a broad oral health strategy for remote communities. We were not able to do anything on this until Canada had signed off, but we do have agreement on this pan-territorial initiative.

We do have funding to hire staff for the next year to work on this. We do hope, with that funding, to come up with some cost-effective and, actually, meaningful on-the-ground initiatives that we can roll out in the small communities, in addition to some of the work that we already do. We do have a Dental Therapy Program. We do have many of our dental therapist positions filled, and we do do a fair amount of oral health work through the Healthy Families program and through the schools, but we know we need to do more. We are developing this strategy over the next year.