That was my next question. When will the department make necessary changes to their policy to allow a nurse to be placed in a community such as Tsiigehtchic? Thank you.

What we want to do is provide quality care to all the residents of the Northwest Territories. We want to make sure that our residents have access. I’m not going to presuppose the finding of the review of the ISDM, but we are looking for ways to improve the services that are provided in all of our communities. As I’ve indicated, we will be doing that review. I don’t have a timeline in front of me today, but I will get back to the Member with a bit more clarity on how long that review is going to take. I’m really interested in getting input from the Member as well as committee as we move forward with that review. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Back in I believe it was 2001 we did have a nurse in Tsiigehtchic that did work very well in the community. I think all we need to do is amend those policies to what we had in 2001 and that will fix the situation. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Blake. More of a suggestion, but, Mr. Abernethy.

I appreciate the comment and I look forward to doing the review, as I’ve indicated. There is way more to it than adding in a nurse, or not adding, in a community. We need to make sure the liability issues are good; we need to make sure that safety is taken into consideration; we need to make sure the community is receiving the services they need and expect, so there are a number of things to consider. It’s not just a matter of saying yes, but I will work on it with the Member and committee and get back to the Member with additional information. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about the alarming statistics in our daily intake of sugar and some of the national guidelines that will be forthcoming from

our National Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. Last week I wanted to take this journey a bit further and I posed some specifics around obesity in our territory. This week I’d like to ask some questions to the Minister of Health and Social Services on the subject.

As I said, a couple of weeks ago I asked a question to the Minister of what he was doing specifically in dealing with our daily consumption of sugar in the Northwest Territories. His response, and I quote from Hansard: “I’m not sure. I can’t really speak to the specifics of whether we have programs aimed just purely at sugar, but I will get the information for the Member.”

Can the Minister give the House any update on what he discovered? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The honourable Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have directed the department to pull that information together. It hasn’t been pulled together at this point, but we will get it to the Member at our earliest convenience. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Can the Minister inform the House of any specific programs that are integrated with our daycares, our soon-to-be junior kindergartens and our schools that deal with sugar and calorie education? If not, why?

In cooperation with Education, Culture and Employment and MACA, we are obviously encouraging healthy living, healthy eating, healthy activity within our schools and within our youth populations. We do have the Drop the Pop campaign, which is specifically aimed at pop, but by default, we are trying to address some sugar issues there as well.

In this budget, we also have a significant amount of money – $1 million – put into healthy eating for school programs as part of our Early Childhood Development and Anti-Poverty strategies. So there are a number of things we’re trying to do. I personally believe we need to do more and we will be working with the department to put in more strategies to encourage healthy eating, including a greater awareness on sugar and the differences between more raw based sugars that are in food which has a higher glycemic index.

It sounds like the Minister is becoming more aware of sugar and I applaud his knowledge on it.

Can the Minister inform the House if his department collects statistics on obesity in the Northwest Territories and, more specifically, the economic and regional variances? If so, is this information publicly available? Thank you.

We don’t have that type of data, but we will be looking at improving our

record keeping and be able to have more solid record keeping and be able to provide more timely statistics to all Members of the House, including Cabinet, once we have passed the Health Information Act and it moves forward via…(inaudible)…we will have the ability to track data on a more real time basis. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

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

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think we are making headway here today. Can the Minister inform the House what his policy on dealing with obesity is in the Northwest Territories? Does he have a strategy he can share with us? Thank you.

As I’ve already indicated, we are trying to deal with it on a more holistic level. We are working on promoting healthy living, healthy activity and healthy eating. We are doing that in cooperation with Education, Culture and Employment and MACA. Obviously, we would like to do a little bit more. I think it’s important to educate the people on the differences of natural sugar occurring in food and white sugar, which is more of the problem than the sugar naturally occurring in food.

We need to do a better job. We are going to put something together so that we can help people understand the difference and help them have informed decisions. Thank you.

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

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Last week I wrote the Minister of Transportation some questions about the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the potential of closing the road only to winter travel, and my questions today are for him in asking, with the temperatures still not dropping in the Sahtu region, why the roads are being closed to winter road traffic only?

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. The Minister of Transportation, Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For communication purposes, we’ve communicated, when we saw that the weather was warming up a bit, a possibility of reducing heavy traffic to night traffic, but at this time there are no restrictions. Thank you.

Thank you. My next question about these roads is the maintenance and indications are that the maintenance and operations of the maintenance are being shut down at this

current time, I’m assuming because of funding. Is this true?

Thank you. The maintenance that needs to be done on the winter road is being done. There will sometimes be just putting heavy equipment on the winter roads, such as heavy maintenance equipment, will do more harm than good in shortening the length that the road may be open. So, essentially what is happening is in any areas where they are dark and attractive to the sun, we try to cover it with snow. But the maintenance that needs to be done to extend the road as long as possible will be done. Thank you.

Thank you. I know with this road specifically we’ve gotten some assistance from industry. I’m just wondering: is there a set budget for this type of maintenance, or do we basically continue the maintenance until we can keep the road open as long as possible and are we allowed to have cost overruns similar to firefighting season? We don’t know what the length of a winter season is going to be and it may be more costly. So is there a set budget and are we allowed to exceed the maintenance budgets?

Thank you. Generally the winter roads operate in a certain time period. We track the average times in which the roads remain open. As far as the operations costs of the road, these are all done by contract. So we sign the contract with a company to do a certain part of the winter road and we stay with that contract, and that contract is intended to provide services from the time the road opens until the road closes. Thank you.