Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Department of Health and Social Services certainly has put some of its infrastructure where it’s needed, into our regions. I continue to thank the government for the support on the new wellness centre in Norman Wells and the territorial long-term care facility that’s associated with it. I know that’s something that’s needed and certainly the people in the Sahtu and surrounding communities that have sent out their elders to Inuvik or the Yellowknife area and to Fort Simpson appreciate that one day we will have a centre in the Sahtu, where we can have our elders closer to home who require 24/7 medical care. We certainly appreciate the support from the department to continue to push this, even though there are some dates that have been moved back because of some of the technical design issues and working in our region. So I wanted to say thank you to the Minister and his staff for moving on this issue.

We certainly look forward to the continuation of the planning study for the Tulita Health Centre. That health centre has been on the books for a while and I look forward to the Minister encouraging his staff members to conclude the issues that need to be to bring this forward to a decision level where funding

can be found for the construction of the centre in Tulita. It’s one thing to have a planning study completed; it’s another to find out where the money is going to come from to build it against all the other needs in the Northwest Territories on the medical services such as the infrastructure of this budget. So that I look forward to, seeing the Minister moving closer to moving it over, and to securing money for that facility. First the department needs to complete the planning study to build this infrastructure in the community. So I’d like to continue to press the Minister on this important issue.

The other one is the support on this is somewhat in line with my colleague from the Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake, in that we have the infrastructure. We need to now provide personnel to that community for comfort and security and protection of people and look forward to the Minister’s imagination as to how we could bring in personnel. I know we’re talking about the O and M; however, the infrastructure is there, we have the housing, we have the building. It’s not very cool to have an empty building. We certainly see a need in the small communities to put personnel into those buildings.

I guess I’m talking first things first in the health care in our smaller communities. There I wanted to ask the Minister on the different classes of communities. I have an understanding from the Housing Corporation that there are different classes as they allocate the funding for certain housing. There’s class C and B in there, so is that similar to Mr. Beaulieu’s response previously as the Health Minister, in terms of the different classes for the different types of health centres or health stations or regional wellness centres such as the Stanton Territorial Hospital? So we have different classes in our communities that receive different types of funding based on the regional and geographical area or the needs in that community.

I wanted to leave it at that. Those are my opening comments to the Minister. I do look forward to having some discussion later on, on the community programs for our communities through the Social Services, especially for some of the programs or some of the infrastructures that can be put in here in regard to the new direction that the alcohol and drug addictions programs will be taking. Is that something that we need to look at or is that something I need to come back to another time? I’ll leave it at that there at your discretion, Mr. Chair.