Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My Member’s statement will be somewhat close to
what Mr. Blake has been talking about, some of the communities that have not some of these essential services in our communities. Mr. Blake is talking about full-time nurses in our communities, and I believe there are eight communities that do not have full-time nurses in our communities and, you know, we do with what we have. The small communities pull together, you know, and do the best they can.
Year after year as an MLA, we come before the government and ask if it would be possible to put in a full-time nurse, or even, in one of our 11 communities, to put in an RCMP officer, and the government always comes back with some enormous cost to meet that request, and they always have come back with not having enough money or haven’t planned for it, or it doesn’t quite meet the criteria. Even with our schooling, with the quality of education. It’s a matter of fact that the latest report from the Department of Education, Culture and Employment says that in our small communities, 50 percent of our students are not up to par in the grade level. You know, in 2015 we’ve got to fight doubly hard to get the grades that we want for our students, otherwise we’re just toying with them.
We want to ask this government, are there other ways that we can help on this side, and I believe that we can. I believe we can help make some changes with the bureaucrats for their own people’s attitudes and minds of how do we do things. You know, why do we have to spend $100,000 to house one inmate if we change some behaviour? Or when people are drinking excessively, we spend somewhere around $14,000 at Nats’ejee K’eh to put them in a 28-day treatment program.
I believe we need that type of thinking amongst ourselves, in our communities, to make changes to deal with what we have to do within today’s budget.
I’ll ask the Minister questions later on. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.