Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is a very important topic across the Northwest Territories. We have heard that in many of our public places they would like to have automatic external defibrillators, AEDs, in their facilities.
Working with the communities, there is an opportunity there for the communities to use the funding that we provide to purchase the defibrillators and then, as we debated in the budget in the House just recently, we had some extra money in there for emergency training and ground ambulance training. That pot of money could also be used for training on the use of defibrillators. We feel that is very important. I think communities are starting to recognize the importance of having these.
As far as I know, all the health centres across the Northwest Territories do have them in the health
centres. We have to expand that. We have to expand that to the communities.
We have a meeting coming up with the NWT Association of Communities up in Inuvik. I’m sure this is an issue that will be discussed, because I think we are starting to see more and more the benefits of having devices such as these in a lot of our public places, in community halls especially where there are always large gatherings. There are opportunities there to improve on this.
Again, I say that because of the fact that we give the money to communities and they determine how they want to use it, there will be an opportunity there for them to purchase these. We have to ensure that the training goes along with it. We have to also do some research with our other jurisdictions to see if there is any type of liability, how we, as a government, can legislate or regulate liabilities. So we’ll do the work. We will work with the communities again.
I think this is an important motion. I think it’s important to people across the Northwest Territories. As this is a recommendation, Cabinet will be abstaining from the vote. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.