Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I too rise in support of this motion and I want to thank the mover and the seconder for bringing it forward. I think it’s a very important issue to consider. We have had a very serious situation at Stanton. We’ve had several serious situations at Stanton and it seems that it is happening more and more often. As has been mentioned, we have other health care facilities within the NWT and we don’t want the same thing to happen there.
A change is needed. Some adjustment is needed, and it needs to be made sooner rather than later. The Minister has said that the hospital is doing an evaluation, that the hospital is doing some planning. That’s been happening for a number of months now so it’s not something which should be taking this
long to make the change. It requires a much faster response, and the reasons in the motion and the reasons that have been articulated by my colleague Mr. Bromley are the very reasons why we need to have a faster response. It also needs a stronger response than what we’ve seen so far. There have been some changes made, from what I understand, but I don’t believe that they go far enough. There needs to be an opportunity for staff to feel safe. That’s been mentioned already. I don’t think staff feel safe if they don’t know that the security guards who are there can use physical restraint to deal with people that are unruly.
The main focus in this motion tends to be Stanton, but as I’ve said, we have health care facilities throughout the NWT and we need to make sure that the same situations do not end up happening in health care facilities outside of Yellowknife.
In 2011 an analysis of the situation that occurred with Allisdair Leishman had a number of recommendations, and one of them was to increase security at the hospital. It’s my understanding that there were no changes at the hospital. Those recommendations from that investigation were not followed up on. So for any number of reasons, we need to make sure that we take action, that we take action soon. For the safety of our staff particularly, I think staff need to be recognized for the work that they do there and for the situation that we are putting them in. Not all the time, but they shouldn’t be in that situation at all.
I want to say that I appreciate Mr. Bromley for bringing this motion forward, and I would urge my colleagues to vote in favour.