Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a number of questions in this section. I want to first talk about midwifery, and we’ve talked a great deal about midwifery in our statements and oral questions in the House, but I want to try and get my point across to the Minister here that I don’t believe we need a clinical coordinator position, which is what is called for in this budget. I believe that we don’t need to do any more planning. I believe that we have the act on the regulations in place which are currently governing the Midwifery Program in Fort Smith, and I believe really strongly that we can hire a couple of midwives and put them into Hay River and start the program in Hay River in 2013-14, as opposed to spending the year and the money planning and start the program in ‘14-15.

I think we do this too often. We plan more than we need to, and I recognize that the regulations may be out of date, but the regulations seem to be doing just fine, thank you very much, for Fort Smith and have been doing just fine since 2005. So I don’t quite buy the argument of the department and the Minister that we need to put money into a coordinator, or to put midwifery into a new community, and I don’t buy the argument of the department that we need to spend a year planning and drafting regulations and policies and whatever. So I wanted to make that statement.

I wanted to also ask a question with regard to the health services administration division. The administration of our health benefits programs is done through Inuvik, the department has located that section of the department there. There have been, I think the Minister is well aware, a number of issues with customer service and particularly with an inability for residents to get somebody to call them back. I understand that often staff are busy, but there have been situations that I am aware of where people either e-mail or phone, and the e-mail is never responded to, the phone calls or the phone message that is left is not responded to. In one situation the resident had to contact me as their MLA and ask me to intervene. For whatever reason, our phone call, the phone call from my office got results within a couple of days, but this person had been trying for two and three months to get an answer out of health services in Inuvik. So I would like to suggest that the Minister needs to look at the operation of the office in Inuvik and try to not streamline it, because I don’t think we need to streamline it any more, but we do need to look at it with a view to better customer service.

My question here has to do with health care cards, and I think somebody mentioned it last week, that there’s always been the perception that we have more people with health care cards than we do have residents in the NWT, and a couple of years ago the Health and Social Services department did do, I think, an audit of health care cards. I’d like to know the results of that audit and I’d like to know if

the current practice of asking people to reapply for their health care card is expected to solve the problem of people with health care cards not living in the Territories. Thank you.