Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to make a couple of quick comments. Obviously, this bill is very important to Hay River. Hay River is the anomaly in the process. Our employees are not GNWT employees and that became a big issue with this bill, and obviously I’d like to commend the Minister and his staff for getting us as much information there so that we give some comfort to those people, I guess. The question is still out there about how it’s going to look when it’s all said and done, but I think the department is committed to that process and committed to communicating with the staff at the Hay River Health Authority.
Obviously, some of them are still tandem on how it’s going to work, how they will be affected for
leave. Even as of last week I ran into some people and they were still asking me questions on how they thought it was going to work. I said, “Well, I think the details have to be worked out still.” But I know when it did get tense there for the first little while, the Minister provided me with a bunch of information that I could provide to the employees, to the union to reassure them that this is the process. We had a constituency meeting that basically got held up by all these concerned citizens. Obviously, we were able to give them the information.
So I think moving forward we obviously want to keep an eye on how this goes, and obviously the union and the employees will tell us how they feel about the new process once they become GNWT employees.
In general, I think some of the other issues that are out there, and I think people are in support of, is this new health authority will give areas like Hay River an ability to have more context by creating feedback, ways of communicating with the public. Right now we have just the public administrator, but I think through some of these councils and the regional representation we’re going to be able to get some of that feedback from multiple users, and it’s not just feedback to the public administrator. If you didn’t know that public administrator or you didn’t feel comfortable communicating with them, there are other avenues now with this authority. I think that has been something that Hay River has been asking for, so I think they are really supportive of that.
Those are just my general comments. I’d like to thank the committee that did all the work. Obviously, they travelled around with a couple of bills. I was able to help them out in Hay River to make sure everybody showed up, but that wasn’t a tough sell with people being concerned about where they were. Again, the Minister came down for a separate meeting to talk to the employees right at the hospital, so I think most of their concerns have been alleviated for now until we start working out the details with their union and how all that stuff works out. The proof will be in the pudding on that, I guess, but we need this bill to move forward in order for that to happen.