Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I didn’t indicate that addictions was the responsibility, solely a personal responsibility. I’d indicated that addressing addictions was a personal responsibility and what we’re trying to do is to try to provide some supports, and mentioning the Nats’ejee K’eh would be one of those supports in addition to some of the community programs like on-the-land programs, also, in addition to some of the early findings of the forum of maybe addressing some parental issues, putting in programs to assist parents at the community level and so on.

So it wasn’t to take all the money out of trying to address issues with addictions and writing it off as a sole responsibility. That, I didn’t say. I said that it was a personal responsibility. A lot of people with addiction issues have gone to complete sobriety on their own. That, we know for sure. That’s a fact. Many individuals that have addressed the issue on their own are sober.

There are people that need assistance. That is true. If you’re into the counselling business you have people coming to you. The Community Counselling Program, we’re spending $6 million in the Community Counselling Program. We’re continuing that. We recognize that people come to get assistance, but if you make a personal choice to try to address your addiction issues, then all of the support that can be provided by the department, by the Community Counselling Program or any new programs that are recommended through the addictions forums, will all be aids in place to be able to help people address those issues.

Just on the management of chronic disease, I think what the Members are trying to get from the department is to zero in on having a specific Chronic Disease Management Strategy, but in reality it is throughout our work. If we develop a Chronic Disease Strategy, that’s okay, because it can refer to all kinds of programs that are in the system, but in our system the areas of prevention and promotion, which is an area where the Members don’t agree with the amount of money that we’re saying we’re putting into prevention and promotion. So we encounter that. We see prevention and promotion throughout the entire budget. We see chronic disease management throughout the entire budget. We’re looking at the whole area of anything to do where we’re working with like, one example is TAMI, Talking About

Mental Illness. That program, as an example, is a program that we’re working on. So we’re not doing nothing at all, we’re working there. We have Mental Health First Aid, we’re putting money into mental health and addictions, we’re working on three separate pilots right now, a cancer strategy, healthy eating pilots, and renal is the other one. Then we’re piloting three, I guess, that we were going to use as a base, renal, diabetes – and I don’t remember the locations, but we could have the deputy provide the locations – and mental health.

There are lots of different things happening in the department. I go through a lot of reports that were there before I started. I don’t memorize the reports. I’ve got a huge job trying to move this department forward, trying to address the issues. I think issues that are important to the health of the people in the Northwest Territories. If Mr. Moses asks me questions specific to whether this is in the report or whether you read this report, he talked about several reports yesterday that he mentions again today. One of the reports I hadn’t heard of but the reporter had it. When the guy opened it up and showed me the consultation of it and so on, it was a bit different than the consultation that we’re doing under the forum that we’re doing now. I had indicated to him that we are trying to get more of a community, people going out there doing consultation with the communities and trying to develop something from that. It is costing a bit of money, $300,000, but we think that once we get that report and once we action the report, we will gain that money back in the long run.