Mr. Chair, thanks to the Minister for finally acquiescing and agreeing that we complain to him. I’m not proposing that the government implement a service, but I think the government has a bit of a responsibility to assist the community or communities that do want to try and put the service into place. I appreciate the Minister’s position here. As long as some support is provided, I think that’s fair.

The Minister mentioned ground ambulance. I was going to wait for the next page, but I will mention it here. It’s kind of all part of the same thing. I wanted to just point out that the Minister has heard, in the last week or two, quite a few Members talk about the need for a number of things relative to ground ambulance. One is equipment. Particularly Mr. Nadli has mentioned Fort Providence, who is quite concerned about the responsibility that the community has, relative to the highway on either side of them. We have equipment. We have training of first responders which is required. Then there is the cost just to kind of run an operation, whether it is just emergency response or whether it is fire and rescue.

The $200,000 that’s in this budget is peanuts, really. I know it has changed a bit. With pressure from Members over the last year or two, that it still is being used for training, but even if the department recognizes that communities, for

instance like the City of Yellowknife, do incur costs when they go outside their city boundaries in order to… Whether it is ambulance or whether it is fire, and if reimbursement could be done based on actual invoices or something like that, there really needs to be a look at what it’s costing communities, but there also needs to be a recognition that communities on the highway are taking their responsibility to assist people in trouble. They are paying for it. I hate to use the word downloading because it is not being downloaded, but the government is basically kind of turning a blind eye and saying, you guys are taking care of it, that’s all well and good.

I think we need to provide more support, because communities fall in your basket. I just would like to exhort the Minister to seriously try to expand what we have in this current budget, maybe not for this year but for 2014-15 budget year. If we can resurrect that joint working group that was looking at ground ambulance a number of years ago, I know that what came up was hugely expensive, but maybe modify that and find something that’s halfway in the middle that we can maybe afford. I think a number of communities would be happy if we could get there. More a comment than a question. Thanks, Mr. Chair.