Thank you, Madam Speaker. Last week I had a very interesting conversation with a staff member who does work with one of the organizations that does good work on behalf of government, and we started talking about mental health and other issues that are associated with mental health, but the conversation got into suicides and the high rate of suicides in the NWT. According to our 2011 Health Status Report, the Northwest Territories is 65 percent higher than the rest of Canada, which is alarming and should actually be an issue and a focus for this government moving forward.

As we talked, we talked about how many counsellors we have across the Northwest Territories. I think it’s about 65 counsellors, but 65 counsellors in 19 communities. We have 33 communities in the Northwest Territories, which means that there are some people out there who are having some of these issues and concerns that are not getting addressed and rely either on telehealth or maybe through making phone calls, which is not always the best avenue. When you’re dealing with an individual, it’s always good to have that face-to-face so you can see expression, so you can see the stress that might be on these people.

As we talked a little bit more, we talked about suicide attempts, how we don’t keep stats of suicide attempts in the Northwest Territories. We have stats on the numbers of suicides, but this government and the department, possibly the Department of Health, can actually take a role, even the Department of Justice through the RCMP, with anybody who ends up in the emergency ward with self-inflicting injuries, that we start taking these statistics now and start looking at how many real issues we have out there in our communities that we can address now. Actually, it’s not taken at the

moment, and in some cases these people who have self-inflicting injuries who end up in our emergency wards are sometimes let back out into their communities, which is contravening our Mental Health Act, which is something I’ve brought up in this House many times.

Moving forward, there are a lot of ways we can do prevention in this area, save the lives of many of our residents in the Northwest Territories and start providing better services in the communities.

I will have questions later on today for the Minister of Health and Social Services on how do we affect change, how do we make change. How do we start putting these things in order now to protect the lives of our residents of the Northwest Territories? Thank you, Madam Speaker.