Thank you, Mr. Chair. Actually, I had my questions focused around chronic disease management and dollars that are being allocated to that. However, the Minister did make a comment there to my colleague’s previous question and one of her concerns was why the Addictions Forum doesn’t contain mental health, and the Minister did mention that he feels that addictions is a personal responsibility. But when you get into the frontline work and you work with individuals that are battling addictions, and you sit down with people that are having a hard time and they can’t get out of the rut of addictions, a lot of it deals with mental health issues. A lot of it is more than just a personal responsibility.
Some of these guys need education; they need an education into personal life choices. You can’t just assume that because they’re a young adult, that they’re an adult or even an elder, that they can make those personal decisions on their own, or those choices. I think that’s where my colleague was trying to go with why we’re not focusing on mental health with addictions, because they do go
hand in hand, and we just have to go down and walk into some of these communities where we’ll see people who are battling with addictions that need that extra support.
I don’t agree with the Minister’s comments that it comes down solely to personal responsibility because this government has a responsibility to offer those services to help those that need that help. If you go and talk to somebody who might be battling addictions, they don’t have the education, they might not have had education.
We’re going through a curriculum right now where we’re going back to residential schools. People’s lives are traumatized at an early age and they can’t make those decisions on their own. So I disagree with what the Minister had said to my colleague, and that is a personal responsibility because there are some people that can’t make that decision or choice on their own. So I just wanted to, for the record, state that, and I will make sure that there will be questions asked in the House and get it on for the record when we’re trying to help our residents of the Northwest Territories, because comments like that really do upset me, Mr. Chair.
Moving forward on to my initial questions and I’ll allow the Minister to respond to that comment. As well, I would like to get more clarification on his thoughts.
In the NWT, 70 percent of all deaths and more than 50 percent of the number of days spent in hospitals were related to chronic conditions. Also, I wanted to throw a couple more stats in there. Approximately 200 new cases of diabetes are diagnosed each year, which are a direct correlation to nutrition, active living and, as stated earlier today, that 63 percent of our NWT residents are overweight and obese. Then when you look at the chronic disease mortality rates, 23 percent are related to cardiovascular deaths. I want to know what the Minister is doing to decrease any one of these statistics that we see, that the public sees that we’ve got to be making plans to cut these down, whether it’s the 70 percent of all deaths, the number of hospitalizations related to chronic disease.
We’ve got to set performance measures. We’ve got 200 new cases of diabetes. How can we set a performance measure that next year we’ll only get 150? That would be success. Or even better, how do we not get any at all? That all leads to prevention and promotion, and that’s where we’re not focusing our dollars. How do we cut down on the 23 percent of cardiovascular deaths that we see each year?
I want to know what the Minister is doing and if he’s looking at providing more dollars into the prevention and promotion so that we can start addressing some of these issues that are clearly stated in the 2011 Health Status Report. I don’t want to get into
asking him questions again if he’s read that report, or not because I’m doing my homework over here and I hope the Minister is doing his. He’s got a big stack, he’s got a big department and, honestly, I was just going to ask a nice question, but his comments to my colleague earlier really got me hot under the collar here. Thank you, Mr. Chair.