Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to speak to this motion a bit. I discussed some of the statistics when I made my statement earlier today, but I wanted to remind people that in the NWT, if the rates of physical activity of our people – young people and older people – are going down and our rates of obesity are increasing, that does not bode well for our health system. It means we are going to have more and more demands and more and more of a drain financially on our health system and on our government.

We have pretty good services here in the city of Yellowknife and we have reasonably good services in our regional centres, but our smaller communities, anybody who lives outside of the city of Yellowknife or our regional centres tend to need greater support in terms of prevention and promotion. I want to recognize that we have had an increase in the budget to prevention and promotion over the last year or so, but this motion speaks to the need for even more money to be put into prevention and promotion.

One of the things that have been working reasonably well, from what I understand, is the diabetes clinic. It operates in a number of places. I can’t remember how many right now, but we need to expand the Diabetes Clinic Program to more communities. That’s the kind of thing that I’m referencing with this motion, is we need to expand all of the present programs and services that we have which deal with the prevention and promotion. Things like hypertension and cardiac disease are a large drain on our system. Tuberculosis screening is another one. We still, unfortunately, have difficulties with tuberculosis. It’s a condition which has existed for a long time and continues to exist, so we need to make sure that we have enough screening to be able to catch it and, hopefully, eliminate it in the near future.

One of the things that I think we do a fair bit of but I think we need to do more of, and this goes to the promotion aspect of the motion, is we need to educate people, all of our residents – particularly our young people, though – and we need to raise the awareness of particularly our young people to the risks of poor health, to the risks of inactivity. Again, I don’t think the department has enough money within their department to do the adequate education that is required.

Lastly, one of the other things that I think we’ve done a reasonably good job in the last couple of years on is increasing the screening for colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is the highest incidence of cancer in our territory. Caught early, it’s a disease which can easily be cured, but without screening it cannot be caught. It’s really important that we increase the colorectal screening and make

sure it’s available beyond the city of Yellowknife and our regional centres.

Those sorts of things are what the motion references and I hope that Members will support the need for greater money for prevention and promotion.