You’re welcome, Mr. Moses. Order! Order! Member for Tu Nedhe, Mr. Beaulieu.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to do another tribute. I’d like to do a tribute to a Mr. Roy King Sr. from Fort Resolution. Mr. King was my uncle. He was born on May 6, 1949, and passed away October 3, 2013, at the age of 64. Roy Sr. was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the spring and passed away in the fall.

Roy King Sr. was born in Rocher River and was raised in Rocher River and Rat River. He was the youngest of Francois King and Judith Giroux’s children. Rocher River was a thriving community where people lived directly on the land. Roy attended school in Rocher River until the school burned down, then he moved to Fort Resolution.

Mr. Speaker, Roy loved his family and was dearly loved by his family in return. This was illustrated by his brothers Tommy and Wilfred, and his sister Annie’s children all coming together to bury him a couple weeks ago.

Over the past 20 years, Roy lived with Mary Petit-Jean in Fort Resolution. Roy worked for forestry for many years and retired a couple years ago. He wanted to eventually build a cabin along the Taltson River and go back to living off the land.

Roy would travel with the new boat that he had purchased, on the Slave River, Jean River, up to the Rocher River, Rat River and many of those areas, exploring places where he thought he was eventually going to build his cabin.

Mr. King is survived by his common-law, Mary Petit-Jean; his son, Roy Jr. and his common-law, Julia; and the only remaining sibling in his family, my mother, Annie; along with his grandchildren, Destry, Deborah, Carol, Jared, Greg; many great-grandchildren, Grace, Peton, Roy Jr. 3rd ; stepson

Greg Villeneuve and his wife, Lorraine; and many nieces and nephews and great-nieces and nephews.

My condolences go out to Roy’s family and friends, and especially his common-law, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and my mother. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Thoughts and prayers to the family. Item 4, returns to oral questions. Item 5, recognition of visitors in the gallery. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize visitors from the Status of Women Council of the Northwest Territories who chair the Coalition Against Family Violence: Lorraine Phaneuf, the executive director; Annemieke Mulders, programs and research manager;

Samantha Dechief, community development coordinator; and David Wasylciw. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, would like to welcome the group from the Status of Women Council here to the House. Can’t see you guys up there behind me, but I know you’re there. Mr. Wasylciw, as well. He’s not a constituent, but we talk often enough he probably could be.

I would particularly like to welcome back some people who used to reside in Yellowknife. I want to call them old residents, but that’s not all that good. Sitting here we have Dr. Anne Davies. Her claim to fame, one of many, is that she was the first full-time president of the NWT Teachers’ Association in 1979. Ms. Davies is internationally renowned. She’s an author, teacher, researcher, particularly on education in classroom assessment. With her is Mr. Stuart Duncan, also a former Yellowknifer, a resident here from 1970 to 1986. So welcome, too. He worked with the government in Public Works. He was a founding member of Ecology North and Sport North. I cannot forget my most valuable constituency assistant, Amanda. Welcome all. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Item 6, acknowledgements. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to acknowledge well-known youth Andy Carpenter Jr., who passed away suddenly in Norman Wells. People remember him as a youth who was easily liked and made everyone smile. He was a youth who was kind-hearted and always had a positive attitude towards everybody in life. He enjoyed hunting and was a strong athletic motivator.

We will always remember Andy in our hearts, especially by his parents, family and friends. Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Again, thoughts and prayers with the Carpenter family. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I request permission to return to item number 5 on the Order Paper.

---Unanimous consent granted

Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Item 7, oral questions. Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Earlier I spoke about dental issues in the North and how I wanted to find out more about how dentists are funded to go into the communities.

I’d like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services if he can give me a little bit of information on how dental services are provided to the smaller communities. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. The Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As Mr. Menicoche indicated in his Member’s statement, dental services are not an insured service by the Government of the Northwest Territories. However, we do work with the dentists, and the dentists go into the communities.

What happens is, during the year the dentists have a program where they’ll contract with the various authorities, and based on those contracts, they contract a certain amount of days that they are to be in each community, and then they are paid according to the amount of days they would spend in the communities. Then they do what they can in the communities just for the dental services, not for therapy and stuff like that.

Like I indicated, the health was transferred in 1988, and it seems like some of the health care is being provided by non-insured health services. Maybe the Minister can just explain about how that is still a federal service and why we’re not taking care of that.

I think that some of the acts of the dentist have to be revamped. Some of the acts are very old, so we are looking at revamping the Dental Profession Act at this time. Although the dental services remains a non-insured service, the department does get support from the federal government through the THSSI funding, or

the Territorial Health System Sustainability Initiative. They provide us about a quarter of a million dollars in this area to pay for the dentists to go in there.

The specific details of why it was not included in a complete transfer in 1988, I don’t have that specific detail here with me today.

I’m not too sure. I was just quick to listen about the particular report that was on the news this morning and that the dentist had spoken about. It addresses that there are shortcomings in the smaller communities, shortcomings in providing dental services, as well as dental awareness.

I’d like to ask the Minister if the department is doing enough in this regard and what is his strategy going forward in improving these services in the smaller communities.

The Department of Health and Social Services is working with the Government of Nunavut and the Government of Yukon developing a pan-territorial oral health strategy. We are doing the oral health strategy because of obvious reasons of health and all kinds of positive impacts. Within that health strategy, we are going to do an oral health promotion and prevention. We have listed many programs that we are looking at and together we’re hoping that, as indicated in the report, the only jurisdiction that had worse results than the Northwest Territories dental-wise was Nunavut, and we are working with them and the Yukon to see if we can develop something in the area of prevention in order that we turn that around. It starts before babies even have teeth, so we’re starting right from scratch in trying to develop a strategy that we think will be effective.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I submit one more time that I think one of the better strategies is to increase the visits, increase the number of days of service to the smaller communities. I’d like to ask the Minister if he will take that into consideration and look at that in his overall strategy. I believe that’s one of the musts that we should do.

Yes, I agree that some more visits by dental staff will be a good part of the oral health strategy. However, I think filling all of the dental therapist positions is also another strategy that we need to employ, and we’ll certainly look at the possibility of increasing visits as we did in other communities that requested that there be more visits. We will again talk to the dental people, within the bounds of our contract with them, to see what is possible.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Deh Cho, Mr. Nadli.