Thank you. Most of it is common sense. The reduction in medical travel will happen, yes, if you had midwives in Yellowknife. However, right now people are coming to Yellowknife to have babies. People are coming to Inuvik to have babies. That’s not going to change. Whether the midwives are in Inuvik or the midwives are in Yellowknife, that’s not changing. The people are still coming here. There’s still medical travel to come here. So that’s the territorial program, same with Inuvik.

Now in Fort Smith, about half of the people that are having babies in Fort Smith are still coming to Yellowknife. Now that they have physicians, that number may change. Hay River does not have physicians. So as we expand Hay River, we’re anticipating that similar numbers may result in Hay River. So there is where you will see some cost savings. Half of the people in Hay River may not have to travel to Yellowknife to have their babies. It’s a community program. However, the savings will be less than the incremental costs of hiring midwives and paying their salaries. It’s pretty simple.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Interesting morning. I rise today and follow up on my Member’s statement today on what did the Department of Health and Social Services learn from the Minister of Finance budget housing dialogue 2012 talks this past fall. As indicated, Health is cited by most participants as the area for most opportunities of savings.

I have been critical since day one on this job on the lack of spending for health initiatives and I stand steadfast to this. However, today I want to work on the other side of that equals sign and focus on savings of opportunity, especially medical travel and medevac services. So my questions today will be for the Minister of Health and Social Services.

Could the Minister of Health and Social Services indicate what his department has done as a result of the findings of Budget Dialogue 2012 with the residents of the Northwest Territories? Thank you.

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

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department recognizes that prevention is probably the key to long-term savings for the department. Some of the money that we’re putting into the system on prevention, at the end of the day, downstream, will have positive financial benefits to the department. So that is probably the main thing.

In as far as medical travel goes, we recognize that maybe medical travel is not as efficient as it should be. There are a lot of pressures on medical travel. People put pressures on medical travel and sometimes individuals that may not be eligible for an escort, as an example, will request one and then there’s pressure put upon departments for the department to provide that additional cost. So, some of those things are there. Then we rely on Stanton to deliver it, thinking that Stanton was the best location for the delivery of the program, but because of a lot of the politics around it and everything, we’re now reviewing that one item, medical travel, one program, and we’re thinking about centralizing that at the department. Thank you.

Thank you, I appreciate the Minister’s response, but I’m referring to the budget dialogue, the voices of the people. More importantly, what opportunities for efficiencies in medical travel services has the Department of Health and Social Services identified as a result of such talks with residents, and are these recommendations in action today or are they coming soon? Thank you.

As a Minister of Health, I’m trying to develop things today that will have a savings in the future. I recognize that the Minister of Finance has done the tour on the ways that they can put the savings into the budget and, as the Member indicates, a lot of them are related to Health as a department, and consulting with my senior managers and finding out how do we think that we can meet some of the objectives of the people in the Territories and that’s what we’re doing. We’re putting together things that we think are huge cost drivers in the system and we’re trying to curb that now so that they will stop being huge cost drivers in the system. An example of that is addictions, early childhood development and many other items that we have in our budget that are working in that direction. Thank you.

Thank you, I appreciate the Minister’s response, but again, I want to focus my questions and response to the medical travel and the concerns the residents have. So a medical travel review has been promised for years now. What assurances can the Minister of Health and Social Services offer and to the people of the Northwest Territories that we will see an improved and more efficient service and travel policy in the life of the 17thAssembly? Thank you.

Thank you. I don’t know how long the promise of reviewing medical travel has gone on. I do know that at this time we are a bit behind in our schedule for reviewing medical travel. Like I indicated in the House yesterday, there are a lot of pressures in our system, a lot of pressures to do a lot of different things in the system. As we had the human resources in the department allocated to certain projects, this is one of the projects which is kind of stumbling out of the blocks, because there’s a lot of real high-priority issues for the department. We are planning to do a review of it and we’re planning on trying to make it more efficient. If the plan was to review it and we didn’t think we could make medical travel more efficient, then we probably wouldn’t do the review, but this is the thought that somehow, some way we will make medical travel more efficient and also dealing with the politics of medical travel too.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m still concerned and confused. We’ve heard the voice of reason of the people. We should treat these as ladders of opportunity to make meaningful changes, especially with what we’ve heard on medical travel from our residents. We’ve heard that the Minister is a great proponent of common-sense approach policies so I’m going to ask the Minister: Will we have a common-sense approach to this policy, in terms of using what we know from the residents and applying those today, so that we have meaningful changes to our Medical Travel Policy at this juncture within the life of this physical Assembly?

Yes, we will continue to employ common sense. The medical travel, we must remember that many individuals who have their opinion on medical travel is based on what they have gone through themselves. There are many, many, many scenarios with medical travel. We have to look at all of them. We also have to take into account the delivery of the program, the politics of it, the regulations. All of those aspects are things that we’re looking at to try and make it more efficient, and to develop a policy that does have common sense and is responsible through the government.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. Robert McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all I want to correct the Member. The Member will be 79 years old in 2038, because I’ll be 78. We continue to raise this issue with our counterparts in Ottawa. We try to get them to see the fact that it is affecting how we administer public housing. I think, between now and then, if they don’t move on this, a lot of decisions may have to be made within the Housing Corporation and the government as to what exactly we want to be. Do we want to be just a social housing provider, or continue with all the programs that we offer now?

I want to ask the Minister, did he say “roughly”? I will be roughly about 78, quick calculations. I want to ask the Minister, is this something we could look at on a territorial strategy for housing, or national housing strategy, that we can think about these types of things that are going to be put onto our future generations with regard to housing in the Northwest Territories?

We do have our Building for the Future, the Northwest Territories strategy for housing looking into the future. There probably is a lot of work that’s going on nationally. A lot of the communities and jurisdictions down south, I think, are going to feel the effect a lot more than we are because their public housing and social housing portfolios are much larger than ours. It is a great concern across this country, not only for us but it affects us quite a bit because we have a majority of our houses, especially in the small communities, that are public housing partly funded by the money that we get from CMHC. We have our strategy and we continue to try and look at ways that we can make improvements to how we do business, cut down the cost of operating our social housing, removing some of public housing from stock. We’ve been quite busy working on our plans and dealing with the declining CMHC funding.

I was reading a book, and in the book there was a quote that said the home is the heart of the nation. In 2038, if that’s the case with the federal government, they’re going to rip the heart of our nation out here. I want to ask the Minister – I know he’s working hard on reducing the public housing units and in regard to his strategy – will this strategy meet the point in 25 years that we will not have any public housing? Will all those homes belong to people in our communities?

We would have to look at that. Ultimately, our goal in the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation is to try and see as many homeowners as possible. We have to recognize, also, that there is always going to be a need for public housing and public housing clients. It’s a bit of a balancing act and we have to weigh those out. Ultimately, we’d like to get people into home ownership. Some of the changes that we want to make now will probably have long-term effects and we’ll have to wait until 2038, if things don’t change by then, to see where the Northwest Territories is at as far as providing housing. We do know that we are trying to address the issue and we’ll continue to do so. That includes bringing our concerns to the federal Minister and the federal government.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister earlier made a ministerial statement on MACA and talked about community ownership and community involvement in planning. I want to ask the Minister if his government colleagues have talked about some type of territorial housing strategy sometime within the life of this government to look at year 2038.

As I mentioned before, we do have the Building for the Future, a strategic framework for housing that we just recently completed. In there it talks about a lot of the ways that we want to deal with the declining CMHC funding. Also, the Member talked about communities. We’ve had communities in the past that have taken on the responsibility of administering their own public housing and realized that it was a lot more than they had bargained for, so they had turned the administration back over to the NWT Housing Corporation. We’re always open to partnerships. I think we’ve proven that in the past. We’d be more than willing to sit down with any community government that has some kind of desire to administer social housing and public housing in their community. However, we will make sure they realize it’s a huge challenge and they need to be ready for it.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.