Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the comments from the Members. The comments were all basically the same and I think these are issues that we’ve been working on.
There’s concern with the ground ambulance and highway rescue. I’ve committed to Members that we are looking at that. We’ll answer specific questions when we get into the particular page, but I do know we’re considering a couple of possible pilot projects; one for sure, possibly two in the north and south communities that are on the highway system. We’re looking at rolling that out soon.
Then there was the water source that Mr. Nadli had raised. We are working closely with the communities of Kakisa and Enterprise to see what options they would have. I made the comment about downloading responsibility on to communities. That is exactly what we have done, we have downloaded responsibility on the communities because the communities have proven that they are quite capable of handling all the new responsibility. We continue to work with them. We see a role now as just working closely with the communities, assisting them any way we can.
Again, the emergency issue came up a couple of times. We have a number of communities that have updated emergency plans. Some of the communities, in particular Mr. Bouchard raised Hay
River, and they have an excellent plan. Having to deal with floods on a number of occasions, they have a good emergency plan in place. We’ve had a couple of issues with some of the other communities.
Again, we have 16 communities that have updated plans, 15 that need updating and two communities without an emergency plan, but we are working closely with the communities to make sure that they get all of their plans updated and we will continue to do that work. I think we have seen, in the last little while, the importance of having good emergency plans and central contact people. So we’ll get all of that straightened away. I think Mr. Dolynny’s comment was I want to see by next budget here that we have all these in place. I can commit that we’ll have more updated action plans by the time we get to the next budget session, probably even through business plan.
Ms. Bisaro raised a number of issues that talked about the 911 that she’s raised on a number of occasions. Again, I think we had that exchange in the House. She said she will have questions when we come to the appropriate page. I think I will just hold off comments until we come to the appropriate pages in the budget and we’ll have a further discussion.
That’s all I have for now, Mr. Chair. I do know that we’re going to be going page by page and Members will have questions. So rather than me trying to answer them all now, I’ll wait until we get to detail. Thank you.