Madam Chair, the department began review of the ground ambulance program approximately two years or so back, where we hired an exterior consultant to support engagement with all of the different municipalities that deliver this service. Through that work, a number of different facets of the program were reviewed, including governance, charge-backs, areas of the road that different municipalities would be responsible for. There was at one point a plan to identify all of the highways across the NWT and which communities would respond on that, although there was never final agreement by all communities on that.

The Minister is correct. A community like Hay River does have highways going in a number of different directions. It does not mean that they are rolling hundreds of kilometres down the road in five different directions, which is part of what that strategy was intended to look at, was a fair approach to how highways would be covered. Much of that work was, we were getting near ready to bring that back for discussion with Members as the deputy referred to in her earlier answer, and this work has been somewhat sidetracked by the discussion around Ingraham Trail. We did not anticipate that the municipality would make a decision regarding their level of service. Nonetheless, that challenge was given to the department to try to address. Emergency services, fire protection services outside the municipal boundary had many of the same issues and concerns as ground ambulance outside municipal boundaries had, so there was certainly a parallel to the issues. It made sense that we continued to look at these in conjunction with each other.

As the Minister referenced and as the deputy said earlier, we have situations where the department of health is delivering ambulatory services. We also have situations where the municipality is delivering ambulatory services, so all of those issues had to be factored into this discussion. Again, as I referenced, we were nearing to bring back a presentation to standing committee on our review of the ground ambulance program and some of the thoughts we had related to all of the different elements of this program. That presentation is still something that we want to do with committee, but the priority around Ingraham Trail and the timeline around addressing Ingraham Trail has somewhat taken that direction of that work on a bit of a tangent for a short period of time until we can get that done. At the end of the day, the work that we are putting into addressing how we are going to deal with fire prevention services on the Ingraham Trail will help to inform the larger discussion around emergency services outside municipal boundaries. Thank you, Madam Chair.