Thank you, Minister responsible for WSCC. Oral questions. Member from Deh Cho.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Infrastructure on the cell service. When will the connections between the communities begin? Thank you.

Thank you, Member from the Deh Cho. Minister of Infrastructure.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this is a situation that we are somewhat dependent or really quite dependent on right now on NorthwesTel. They are our provider of cell services. What we have done in this space is certainly encourage them directly as a stakeholder here in the North but also encourage CRTC to ensure that their funding pots and funding pools are available to provide supports for exactly this service. And, Mr. Speaker, one of the biggest reasons -- or one of the biggest barriers isn't necessarily just the cell towers themselves. It's the lack of energy to actually power those cell towers. So, Mr. Speaker, we've raised these issues both, as I said, with NorthwesTel and CRTC and certainly are hoping that we will continue to see positive responses from them in this space as we have on some other issues that we've raised. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, are there any communication safety alternatives that can be put in place between Fort Providence and Yellowknife and the other communities? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, that actually is an opportunity to raise something that has been changing in the last couple of years where some of the vehicles that are used by the GNWT staff and fleet are installing satellite-based technology in those vehicles. This is not a perfect solution but certainly if folks are finding themselves in need on the highways, our staff now are better placed to actually provide cell coverage. And, Mr. Speaker, there's other opportunities that we may be able to use, again, to set up towers that would be localized at key points. Again, so just to provide at least some emergency services. So happy to speak to the Member more and perhaps there may be specific areas along the way that we could work towards having some emergency locations of that sort. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there a record of traffic incidents on these isolated stretches of highway that lack cell service? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there is, indeed, and I certainly can get those numbers for the Member. I don't have all different stretches of highway. But I would certainly be able to provide that to this House.

And, Mr. Speaker, I just want to make one more note. There are -- there is a movement in some phone abilities now for people's cell phones to actually connect directly to satellite. I want to say that here because, again, this is an issue that affects residents, and I appreciate the opportunity to bring attention to the fact that people should look at their own new -- the newer cell phones because they may actually have the ability to connect via satellite without a cell tower. So that technology is changing very rapidly and, again, we want to support residents to use what's available for their safety. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister of Infrastructure. Member from Yellowknife North.

Thank you. Just a brief second here.

Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. I am going to take it under advisement, and I'll make my decision by Monday. Thank you.

Oral questions. Member from Great Slave.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it's tax time. We're at the end of February. So I am going to bring up a perennial issue but not with the Minister of Finance, with the Minister of Infrastructure. Some folks might know Canadian North is no longer supplying the lowest return airfare. You have to go to CRA. And I have constituents asking me, and I will ask the Minister, what sort of engagement has the GNWT, Department of Infrastructure, done with the airlines to make sure that the CRA is considering our northern context? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Member from Great Slave. Minister of Infrastructure.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we certainly have in the past, through Department of Finance, tried to work with CRA to encourage them to have a more flexible approach to determining what the lowest return airfare is. They do now have a tool that they put out. As far as them requiring or requesting the private actors to do that, Mr. Speaker, I can't say that I've certainly myself had any direct requests to them to do that. This issue did come up just recently from the MLA, and I haven't necessarily been able to sort of determine who to ask. In fact, there's been some change obviously of late in terms of who the owners of these organizations are. Happy to take it away, Mr. Speaker, and see if they would be open to some cajoling on that side but, Mr. Speaker, right now it's they're private companies, and it would be up to them whether they want to undertake something different than what they have now. My point of contact, really, would be with CRA to try to continue to get them to improve their processes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you for that, and I'm sorry if I misstated my intent. It's not that I am wanting the Minister to cajole private industry but rather to cajole CRA, as always, as her counterpart in the federal government. I will have questions for the Minister of Finance next. Thanks, Mr. Speaker.

Okay, colleagues, remember, this is oral questions, not opportunity for Member's statements. Thank you.

Oral questions. Member from Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, no matter how small the community is, it needs to have aftercare options so people can live there after treatment. How do we get more aftercare programs into the communities of Dettah, N'dilo, Lutselk'e, and Fort Resolution? Thank you.

Thank you, Member from Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh. Minister for Health and Social Services.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the Member's advocacy on this area. This is a hard discussion. Like, we always are having this discussion because we see it so much. We have it in our families. Addiction recovery is a personal journey, and there's no one size fits all so, yes, we have to provide different ways for people to be able to provide that journey.

Aftercare, you know, we provide a different variety of ways for people to help them to get sober or to deal with their addictions, whatever their addictions may be. But one of the things, and especially I'd like to highlight, is the community wellness and addiction recovery fund. You know, the Member comes from Indigenous communities, and this fund is designed for Indigenous communities to build their own program. It can be used for that aftercare support. There is money available every year for this, and they can design it on how it best fits their needs. We have staff that will support them in creating the proposal for the money. We've tried to make it as seamless as possible. So I would like to highlight that with this Member and, you know, and continue to work with them and his leaders and his communities to access this fund. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don't know if I got any more questions; she answered them all.

But anyway, Mr. Speaker, health can include services from other departments that promote healthy living such as recreation. What about the idea of the health and social services putting coordinators in small communities that can help coordinate all the options for my constituents from multiple departments, especially for the young people? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, again, I'm going to highlight -- and I'm going to continue to highlight the community wellness and addiction recovery fund as well as the suicide prevention fund that each community regional government can apply on up to $72,000 a year. I think the regional wellness and addiction recovery is up to $300,000 plus a year. Those dollars could be used to -- if it's part of their wellness in their community to enhance -- to hire somebody to work with youth, to do recreational programming, that is -- that's the flexibility of these two pots of funding, is to be able to use that money to create the program that will work in their community. So, again, I look forward to working with the Member and being able to -- for his community to access this funding for the betterment of his community residents. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Minister of Health and Social Services. Final supplementary. Member from Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh.

Thank you for that information. That's really helpful. How is the health and social services department coming along to establish a treatment centre here in the Northwest Territories? If that can happen soon enough, will the department work with the Indigenous governments to help make this happen, that would be awesome. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm not going to -- you know, I want to highlight, you know, within the Inuvialuit region they have the Inuvialuit on-the-land camp that they have structured. We've heard and we've seen in the news the Gwich'in camp that they've created. Those are funding that they work bilaterally, a lot of that with the federal government, with some money over the years from GNWT. The Tlicho has recently gone to the federal government for their polysubstance use funding from the feds. There's many pots of funding out there so that Indigenous communities can build. We have heard loud and clear from Indigenous governments that they want to be able to run treatment facilities in the way that they want it close to the land base and provided by Indigenous in Indigenous values. The GNWT is not the place to do that. And so I encourage Indigenous governments to continue to reach out to our department for the community wellness and recovery addiction fund. If there's ways that they can work with our department to highlight other pots of federal funding, I look forward to having those discussions with other Indigenous leaders to access those dollars because I think across our territory, every Indigenous group wants to be able to provide that service in their own way, and we want to support them in that work. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.