Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’ll start off with the financial bit. We do have a $30 million reduction exercise coming in front of us the next couple of years to make up some of the financial shortfalls that we are aware of. We can never ignore that there are those challenges in front of us.

Having said that, this government, with support of committee, has done a significant amount of work on mental health and addictions. We have options in front of our residents today that did not exist previously. A resident who requires detox can go to one of our hospitals and receive detox. Withdrawal management is an issue but we try to find ways to address that. Right now, if somebody needs a medical detox, they can go to one of our hospitals and get that detox.

We have the wellness courts. It’s in the Justice budget. The integrated case management around putting in wellness courts is in that budget. We are moving forward with wellness courts and we have support from the judiciary who are actively involved and engaged. This program will need to be grown over time as we enhance and expand the services that are available, but we have to start somewhere and we have to manage that growth as opposed to jump in without being ready. It will build over time.

In 2013-14 we put in an additional $1.145 million into mental health and addictions for youth addictions, prevention and promotion, service promotion, some case management, some pre-feasibility work for on-the-land programs, youth on-the-land programs. We are running free pilots this year. Development of youth and detox models, which are underway; Stanton Dalhousie psychiatry telehealth and stronger standards of quality assurance.

One of the Members said why not support, we need a good reason why Cabinet will not support this. The reason is we are investing a significant amount of money, but we could do better with the dollars that we have. We need to enhance our programs

and redesign our programs so they meet the needs of our residents. To that end, we have done things already that are making a big difference like streamlining a referral process. An individual now needs treatment in the Northwest Territories can go through a referral process that is 24 hours. We are doing more with less. In this case, more with the same. We can continue to find improvements in our system that will allow us to get maximum benefit for the dollars we have. Throwing dollars at it won’t necessarily solve the problem if we know what we’re trying to fix, and in the department we have lots of opportunity to enhance our programing without dollars by streamlining and rethinking how we do business.

In this budget we’re adding $900,000 for on-the-land programming, which is something new this government hasn’t done before. We are doing good work, and together with the Regular Members, we continue to do more good work.

So there are a number of reasons why throwing $2 million at a problem is not necessarily the best way to go when we already have $6 billion that we’re spending on programs and services for the Government of the Northwest Territories. It’s more important that we do better with the dollars we have to serve the needs of our residents.

Also, we’re engaging communities in way that we haven’t in the past. We have an Aboriginal health and community wellness division that has worked with every community to develop community wellness plans where communities are leading in their wellness. Money is coming from the federal government through us to them so that they can take actions and initiatives. Every one of the communities has identified priorities for work that they want to do.

So there’s a lot happening. Will it be successful? Some of it will take years for sure to know whether it’s successful, but good things are happening and I think we are better positioned, recognizing our fiscal realities, to use the dollars we have and make sure we’re getting maximum benefit as opposed to piling new dollars on top and expecting that throwing money at the problem is going to solve the problem. Redesign, rethinking, working hard, that’s going to solve the problem in the long term. We won’t be supporting this motion.