Thank you, Mr. Speaker -- or sorry, Mr. Chair. Maybe next go around.
Mr. Speaker, I'm quite frustrated with this entire process and how this has gone. You know, the decisions and reasons that were given to me, or to us as a committee from the department and the Minister regarding why this could not go ahead as of now or even in the two years that we've compromised on, they don't wash with me. Some of these things are things that -- such as well, no dental hygienist brought this forward. Well, they're busy. They're working. Everybody's trying to get into dental appointments. So just because they didn't come and initiate this program does not mean they did not show interest. And every single one of them told us this would be a great thing. I had a dental cleaning in the meantime while this bill was going on and my hygienist told me she used to work independently in the south and didn't understand why she wasn't able to do so here in the North. Another reason we were given was that the -- there needed to be time to do culturally-appropriate standard operating procedures and protocols. However, standard operating procedures for this type of work are available across Canada, and that includes in the other two territories, I'm sure. So to me, it would have just been a matter of taking things that already exist and adapting them for our territory. To put it off as waiting for it to be done culture -- in a culturally-appropriate manner when all it is doing is impacting Indigenous children is quite laughable, actually, to me. When I look at that as a reason, we're going in the meantime sacrifice the confidence and the self-esteem of Indigenous children. I've seen children in this House, pages come in, who smile like you wouldn't believe at me until the camera comes out. And when it's time to take the picture, the teeth go away because they don't want people to see their teeth being recorded looking that the way that they are. I noticed that, because I tried to take a picture a couple times with a young page who I knew his family and he wouldn't smile the way he'd smiled the whole week before. I've had braces. I've had numerous fillings. I have teeth that are not great. I can thank my dad for that. And I can tell you that it has impacted me as a person my entire life, to have had teeth that didn't feel like everybody else's and were not the same. And I am lucky because I had parents that had benefits. I had orthodontics. I had cleanings. I had everything. So how do you have that when you have poor health already, because you're living below the poverty line given that everything seems to be here in Yellowknife, including dental services, so now you have all of these issues that lead to medical issues. Like my colleague said, surgeries that are unnecessary, other things that can be determined by dental hygienists. I currently am waiting on something to be investigated from my -- that my dentist has identified. And now I'm in the bog down of health and social services waiting to get that looked at. So if I'm a person who can advocate for myself, I'm a white, professional woman, an MLA in the territory's capital and I find our services lacking, what does that look like in communities? And, you know -- and it comes back to the same thing as mental health. When we're continuously triaging things because we're so far behind, we will never get to the chronic cases. We will never get to the backlog because we are constantly just fighting to stay ahead of the game of where we're at. And that means, like my colleague said, everybody that's an emergency will get what they need -- then they're not even getting what they need. I shouldn't even say that. But the people in emergency will get prioritized, and the other people will not, and their issues will escalate. And when I look at this, this could have been an opportunity for this to have been quite creative because this could go out to engagement with the other professions Acts that are on the table for the next Assembly. There are ones that this department will be going out to do engagement on. So how hard is it, Mr. Chair, to add one more on to that where everybody agrees that it needs to be done? They could have just brought it along in the next one, but instead we actually not only did not have a compromise, we have something that is being actually rolled back even further by a Member that isn't even going to be sitting here. Thank you, Mr. Chair.