Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I do support this motion, and I want to be clear first, too, that my concerns about the increasing use of contracted private paramedics in our small community model of care go beyond regulation. And I've spoken about that in the past because I believe there is a danger that we may be creeping towards trying to replace community health nurses with paramedics. But today I want to focus on the need for regulation as well.

And so the purpose of regulation, it's not just, you know, a bureaucratic administrative exercise. The purpose is to protect the public, to protect patients, and it's to protect the paramedics themselves. And it's to protect the nurses, doctors, the other practitioners who are working alongside the paramedics potentially delegating tasks to them. It's to ensure, first, that paramedics have the proper training and skills before they start work and those training -- that training and skills should be appropriate for the particular jurisdiction that they're working in. In this case, northern healthcare settings, which we all know can be quite unique and challenging.

Regulation is to ensure that the paramedics keep up their skills over time and do enough regular professional development. And it's to ensure that whenever a complaint is raised that it's investigated fully and fairly to everyone involved, both for the patient's sake and for the paramedic's sake. If a paramedic did do something wrong that was egregious enough, they would lose their license, you know, in a regulated system and that would be on the public record, both for every other employer and every other jurisdiction in Canada to see. The danger, of course, that in an unregulated system someone could raise a complaint, it goes to the employer, the easiest thing potentially to do is to fire that person. That could be unfair both to the paramedic, the employee, if they didn't get a chance to make their case or if they felt they were accused of something unfairly, but it also means that that doesn't sort of go on a public record. They could be hired again somewhere else and then the public and patients might be in danger of having someone who is not competent or qualified, you know, working somewhere else.

Now, as my colleague from Range Lake mentioned, the Standing Committee on Social Development has been involved in correspondence with the Minister, trying to ask for some progress to be made on this and in, you know, letters that we've been told can be shared publicly, committee expressed concerns, first, that other paramedic regulatory bodies, you know, in other provinces -- because that's who we're apparently relying on to regulate the paramedics working here -- the committee is concerned that those bodies might be unaware, uninformed, that they're supposed to be responsible for regulating the paramedics working here and asked the Minister to reach out to those provincial paramedic regulatory bodies to make sure that, first of all, that they're even aware that they have licensed paramedics that are working up here and asking them, you know, whether they're willing to assume responsibility for them, would they investigate complaints against those staff that are working up here if they were made to those bodies. And we were told by the Minister that essentially that the department was not willing to do that, to do that work, that those provincial bodies should already be aware and essentially it's not our problem, somebody else's problem. Maybe it's the employer -- if it's a private company, it's the employer's problem. It's the provincial body's problem but it's not our problem.

The Minister argued, for example, that regulatory bodies would require applicants to, you know, provide their address or location if they're applying for a license or to renew their license so the provincial bodies should know.

Well, I've looked into this and in some cases, when you're applying for a license for another regulatory body that if you're filling out the form, that line where it says address or location it might be optional. So, first of all, they might not know who the employer is or where that paramedic is operating. But even so, in doing some investigation myself I have heard from some provincial bodies that, in fact, they do not assume responsibility for paramedics working outside their jurisdiction, that their provincial legislation does not allow them to, and that they would not investigate complaints.

So this puts us, in my mind, in a dangerous situation and something that needs to be addressed quickly. And this is not something to put off to the next Assembly, to some later time. This is already a problem that needs to be addressed now -- or, I mean, should have been addressed yesterday or years ago but certainly needs to be addressed now. And given the fact that health and social services continues to push forward with -- towards a small community model of care for primary care that explicitly increases the use of paramedics, I feel that the issue is urgent. It needs to be sorted out. And we can't sort of put our heads in the sand and say it's someone else's problem, not our problem.

The other thing that is concerning to me about the Minister's responses -- let me just pull it up here -- is when asked about what would happen if there was a complaint, the response said that if there was a complaint that arose from an incident involving an employee of a private contractor, which in our case almost all of our paramedics working in the territory work for private contractors, that the contractor would be responsible for conducting the investigation and connecting with that paramedic's registered regulatory body. So that's very concerning to me that we would entrust that responsibility to the employer. It seems like a conflict of interest to me, and I think we need a more robust system in the territory to protect the public and to protect paramedics themselves.

So for those reasons, I support this motion. I believe we need to move forward with this initiative very quickly. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.