Thanks, Madam Chair. I thank the Member for his comments. I’m not going to go into too much detail, just a couple points.
The Mental Health Act is a priority. We really wanted to get that done in the life of this government. But, as the Member said, it’s huge. It’s a big piece of legislation. It’s an incredibly important piece of legislation. In addition to all the other pieces of legislation that are happening here in the government and all the other work that is being done, I don’t believe we’re going to be able to get it done. I know we’re not going to be able to get it done in time to table in this session and probably won’t be ready in the May/June session as well. But I still believe the work that’s being done on that act needs to get out and people still need to see it. Recognizing that it probably won’t be ready until after May/June, I’m hoping to table it in our fall sitting as a tabled document, which will allow people to look at it and review it over the election period, so that when we come back into the Assembly or, rather, when the 18th Assembly
comes in, the Members of the 18th Assembly have
a piece of legislation that is, for the most part, ready to go and could be ready for first, second and third reading early in the life of the next Assembly. I think
we all would have preferred to get it done, but just the amount of work that it’s taking to get this legislation out there, given the huge amount of interest from people across the Northwest Territories, I don’t believe it’s going to be done.
The Member did talk about some of the motions that were defeated. We are making progress in many of those areas, in particular the oral health area. We’ve actually been able to attain some of the money from the Territorial Health Investment Fund that we’re going to be able to utilize to develop a comprehensive oral health strategy, so we’re making progress there.
We continue to move forward on ECB and supporting the family committees, healthy family programs in the communities. We’re continuing to make progress there.
Even without additional money, the department has been incredibly creative and has been making progress in many of these areas just by living and working in an incredibly fiscally tight environment where there aren’t a lot of financial resources available to chase new programs. We’re looking at doing more with what we have and we’re looking to utilize our dollars more effectively and for better results, rather than just increasing the dollars that we’re spending.