Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have an increasingly urgent need for seniors housing in the NWT. My community, Yellowknife, is blessed with a visionary, committed organization whose reason for being is care for seniors. I speak of Avens – A Community for Seniors.

Avens is unique in the NWT’s health system as it is the only independent organization that runs a health care facility in the NWT. The Aven Campus has four facilities which house seniors across the continuum of care. Aven Manor, the oldest and the original Avens facility, will soon be declared unfit without a major retrofit.

To prepare for the retrofit or the upgrade, Avens engaged in more than 25 formal conversations with stakeholders, to gauge the needs of seniors across the NWT. Three messages were heard.

First, the needs of seniors have increased and Avens is integral to ensuring that infrastructure and programs exist to serve our seniors.

Second, investment into the existing infrastructure at the Aven Campus is important to keep employees and residents safe from harm.

Thirdly, they heard that Avens needs to ensure that their vision aligns with the current realities of our health care system.

More and more every day, Avens gets calls from NWT seniors and their families, asking about options for either affordable housing or extended professional care here in the North. Many of these calls are desperate, a family with an immediate and pressing need, but there are very few options available to our seniors. Avens is full and has no room for any more residents, whether they are local people or from other parts of the territory.

The results of several studies undertaken lately, and some by the GNWT, on seniors demographics and their continuing care needs shows numbers that are frightening. By 2026 the seniors population in the NWT will have doubled. In Yellowknife it will almost triple what it was in 2011.

The current infrastructure plan of the Health and Social Services department will not provide the needed facilities in any sort of reasonable time frame so that the increasing number of elders in the NWT can be properly accommodated. Health and Social Services and, by extension, the government, seems to be placing emphasis and our scarce dollars on an Aging in Place Strategy and not on the development of facilities to house seniors who can no longer live on their own.

I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

---Unanimous consent granted