Thank you, Madam Speaker. I‘ve talked about the bafflegab of our Minister of Finance with respect to our Heritage Fund contributions and I’m sorry to say it continues. Because of the confusion and obscure ways that he chooses to hide the facts, the Minister has once again left the public with the wrong impression about our planned contributions to the Heritage Fund.

In today’s News/North a reporter noted the Minister’s commitment to contributing 25 percent of our net fiscal benefit to the Heritage Fund. The reporter then quite logically does the calculations: an estimated $60 million in net fiscal benefits; 25 percent, or $15 million, to go to Aboriginal governments; 25 percent, or $15 million, to go to the Heritage Fund. But alas, no. In the fine print of the Minister’s bafflegab, he means 25 percent of the net fiscal benefit leftovers after the 25 percent to Aboriginal governments is deducted.

In plain speak, the Minister means 18.75 percent, or $11 million of the net fiscal benefit will go into the Heritage Fund. This is a loss to our children’s future of $3.75 million per year from now going forward.

People may indeed ask why the Minister purposely ignores their desire for 25 percent of the net fiscal benefit to be contributed to the Heritage Fund. They may wonder why the Minister insists on using 25 percent when it is actually 18.75 percent of the net fiscal benefit. All I can say is that these are imminently reasonable questions for the public to ask. Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I stand before the House today dismayed and frustrated. The reason: yet another failing of our health system. A family in Fort Simpson wanted me to raise this issue so no one has to go through this, and I hope we can learn from our mistakes.

This most recent case happened on Wednesday, February 5th , when a Fort Simpson elder slipped

and fell in her home. She was taken by ambulance to the health centre, where two X-rays were taken. The first was blurry, so a second one was taken. Not seeing any obvious break, the doctor sent her home with a prescription of Tylenol 3.

On Thursday she was transported by her daughter in a single-cab pick-up truck for a follow-up appointment. Given my constituent’s condition, she should have been transported by home care in a van designed for disabled clients. In any case, the health centre medical staff failed a second time to diagnose her fractured hip and sent her home once again.

On Friday home care staff made a visit, but no doctor or nurse requested a follow-up examination. She spent the day in pain and great discomfort. It interfered with her eating, sleeping and even going to the washroom.

On Saturday, still in extreme pain, she was brought to the health centre a third time. Finally the doctor diagnosed a fracture and had her medevaced to Yellowknife. There she was thoroughly examined and promptly sent for surgery.

I apologize to my elder constituent and wish her a speedy recovery. I’m also looking to the Minister for immediate action to get to the bottom of this.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated incident. Last October I complained in this House about elders being sent home with aspirins instead of being medevaced to Yellowknife for a full examination. My concerns were triggered by a similar case in which an elder’s broken wrist went undiagnosed for months.

Among seniors, falls are the leading cause of injury. About one-quarter of falls result in moderate to severe injuries, and over 95 percent of hip fractures are caused by falls.

But it’s not only elders being incorrectly diagnosed. A third recent case involved a child who suffered for weeks without receiving critical health care for a serious condition.

The Department of Health and Social Services needs to review its protocols. Errors like this are inexcusable. Mahsi cho.

Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.

Are we doing enough territory-wide to keep our children safe from traffic? Is traffic safety being rigorously incorporated into safe school plans across the NWT?

Going forward, I call on the Minister and other officials to enhance traffic safety measures around Moose Kerr School and to promptly resolve this unsafe situation by building a parking lot. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Blake. Item 4, returns to oral questions. Item 5, recognition of visitors in the gallery. Item 6, acknowledgements.

Item 7, oral questions. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d like to rise and continue my discussions on prescription drug abuse here in the NWT. We do have serious addictions issues in the NWT and I know we are working toward solutions of dealing with them, and clearly I want to state for the record that we don’t want to undermine the fact that alcohol is probably one of, by far, the most abused substance in the NWT, but we do have a number of untracked addictions issues out there. With the recent NWT chief coroner’s report they echo those very same sentiments.

Prescription drug abuse of narcotics, benzodiazepines and certain over-the-counter medications are no longer the quiet addiction, and this addiction is real and now seeing the light of day.

My questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. As the issue of prescription drug abuse continues to surface, and again, when the NWT chief coroner reminds us of these 17 overdose cases from 2009 to 2012, what is the Minister or Department of Health and Social Services doing to track this addiction? Thank you.

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

Thank you, Madam Speaker. We don’t actually have a mechanism to track prescription drug abuse at this point in time, but things are underway to try and address this particular concern, and it is a serious concern and we do need to address it.

Under the Pharmacy Act there is an ability to set up a prescription monitoring program, but due to privacy issues that we’re all aware of, we currently cannot require health care providers to enter information into the program. Because we cannot require health care providers to enter the information, we have not yet set up a program to monitor prescriptions.

We are working on the Health Information Act, and the Health Information Act would require health care providers to enter in the information to a prescription monitoring program, should one be established under the Pharmacy Act. Once we have the Health Information Act, we would be able to set up a functioning prescription monitoring program to help tackle prescription drug abuse issues in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.

It sounds like we’re hearing a broken record here today from the Minister. I heard the very same results here going back almost two years ago in this House on February 14, 2012, from the previous Minister of Health, that there was to be work undertaken with the Bureau of Statistics to include prescription drug abuse with a general addictions survey.

Can the Minister of Health today indicate whether or not this actually happened? Thank you.

There are things happening with respect to the survey. I’ll certainly get that information back to the Member.

Within individual health and social services authorities, or at the authority level, steps have been taken and put in place to limit access to prescription medications in situations where there is a concern about potential abuse of medications. Also, the federal government is currently working in partnership with all of the territories and provinces across the country and looking at ways to address prescription drug abuse. As a department, we will continue to work with the federal and provincial governments on preventing and providing appropriate treatment services, including surveillance data on prescription drug abuse. So there are a number of things we are working on already under this particular issue.

It’s hard for me to understand from the Minister, they’re doing work in this area, but they’re not tracking anything, and without statistics, how do you track this issue? The NWT coroner’s service tables an annual report that makes countless recommendations to assist this government in making strategic decisions with related addictions and death management, but sadly, a large majority of these recommendations fall on deaf ears.

Can the Minister of Health reaffirm his department’s commitment to deal with the recent seven recommendations from the office of the chief coroner on addressing prescription drug abuse in the NWT?

I, like everybody else, have just received the report and will carefully consider the seven recommendations outlined by the coroner; however, I am not prepared to speak to those details yet because we haven’t concluded that review.

To the Member’s first part of the question, we would love to track medications and whatnot in order to avoid these types of issues, but as I said, there really is no system to do that or to require professionals to put that information into a prescription monitoring system until we complete the Health Information Act. Once we have the Health Information Act done, we will be able to make amendments and put in a prescription

monitoring program which all people will be required to provide updates into. Once we have that, we will be able to provide detail and have the information in the future, but until we get the Health Information Act, we don’t have the ability to do that. We are getting that done.

Thank you, Minister Abernethy. Final supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Minister is in error; you can track that information. This government has long-standing adjudication agreements with third-party adjudicators. Aside from the fact from cash-paying customers, they can track this information quite readily if they choose to do so.

Can the Minister indicate specifically what his office will do to improve small community clinical support network and the management of opiate prescribing and opiate addiction?

We can require individuals to put information into a prescription monitoring program, or we can, rather, ask them to do, but we cannot force them to do it at this particular point in time. Once we have the Health Information Act, it will be a requirement and they will need to put it in there. The Member is actually, in fact, wrong.

With respect to what we are doing already, the individual health authorities, as I have already said, have put in place processes to limit access to prescription medications in situations where they have concern about a potential abuser. I will go a little further. The NWT Medical Directors’ Forum is working on guidelines for controlled substances. These will be territory-wide and include the educational component. Guidelines and standards for the medical management of opiate dependence is part of the work the Medical Directors’ Forum on guidelines for controlled substances. One of our physicians has taken training for methadone and Suboxone prescriptions and the management of chronic pain. We will be using the expertise of these physicians and outside experts to further develop controlled substance education throughout the Northwest Territories.

In fact, we are doing a number of things. We take this very seriously. Obviously, we can do more. The Health Information Act will be an important tool for us making progress in this area.

Thank you, Minister Abernethy. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. In my Member’s statement I was talking about

decentralization. My questions today will be for the Premier.

With the government spending millions of dollars on housing and public works preparing for decentralization, does this government have a general overall plan of how this decentralization and these positions will go out to the regions?

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. The honourable Premier, Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Of course we have a plan. We have described it many times. We have a three-phase plan. Phase 1 was where we had departments identify positions to be decentralized. We decentralized 18 positions. Phase 2 was to decentralize through devolution. We are very close to completing that. With our new organizational design, we expect there will be approximately 90 positions that have been decentralized. Now we are entering phase 3. Once all the work on devolution is done, we have requested all of our deputy ministers to identify opportunities for decentralization. Through this budget, when it’s passed, we will have monies to go forward so that we can put in place the infrastructure so that we can decentralize positions.

I have difficulties believing the Premier when he talks about decentralization and phase 2 of devolution, which put more than 200 positions into Yellowknife and only 90 out to the regions, so how is that decentralization? It sounds like centralization to me.

What is the government’s plan going forward to decentralize positions and what is that plan specifically? We’re currently planning to build houses in certain communities. We must have a plan that we’re going to put specific positions into those communities. What is that plan?

Those positions were already in Yellowknife, so that’s why they’re here. The federal government, in negotiating the Devolution Agreement, required that those positions would have to stay where they are for at least two years, so that was the deal.

Now, as part of the business planning process going forward, we expect to have a plan within the next six months. Through the business planning process, we will identify what positions and where they will go. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, I think the Premier has devolution and decentralization mixed up and tied into a knot.

I guess my questions would be: How does the Premier expect this Assembly to complete their goal to decentralize? We haven’t accomplished that. We haven’t gotten to that point where we actually have a plan. Is the Premier committing to

that six-month plan that we’re going to see how decentralization is going to roll out into the communities in this Assembly?