Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In follow-up to my Member’s statement today, I have questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services. In a budget document that we have just been considering during this session, there is an item under program detail called residential care, adults and children, and that number of $45.807 million is for children and adults who are receiving care for an extended period of time to meet their physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological needs, and it includes such things as long-term care facilities, group homes for adults and residential care both inside and outside of the Northwest Territories. I believe that there is also a supplementary appropriation being proposed to actually cause that number to go higher.

I’d like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services to break down that number, if he could, between northern and southern placements.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A number of years ago when the Dene K’onia Young Offender Facility in Hay River was closed down, a need came to light which the GNWT responded to, and a facility called the assisted living facility in Hay River was built for adults who needed to be in residential care. It was an excellent addition to the infrastructure and the economy and to the service spectrum in Hay River and in the North for adults primarily with intellectual challenges.

This facility is managed by the Hay River Health Authority, and I believe it is doing an excellent job. They have 10 permanent beds and I believe that they have two placements for respite care for intermittent use by others.

This organization is involved in the lives of these adults living in this facility. They can be seen out doing recreational activities, out in our community, going out for lunch, participating in community events and being cared for by the numerous people who are employed at the assisted living facility. I would like to thank these folks for the good work that they do and say that I’m very proud to see Northerners being cared for in the North by Northerners.

It raises the issue of how many other adults and children who are Northerners are in the care of southern placements and southern institutions at this time. I will have questions later today for the Minister of Health and Social Services.

When we take our residents and put them in southern placements, they lose out by not living in their home territory. We lose out on the economy of the jobs that are created by caring for them, and I think that there could be a tendency for out-of-sight, out-of-mind. We have to ask ourselves regularly as a government, what are the opportunities for repatriation of those NWT residents that are living in the South? Sometimes I think that, like I said, out-of-sight, out-of-mind, we may forget about them and forget about the opportunities that may arise to bring them home and have them in all regions of our territory.

Later today I will have questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services for more specifics about case management and about how often we review the opportunity for economies of bringing these folks home to the North to be cared for and to live here with us. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to talk about the Hay River Hospital. When the addition was put on the old hospital and the new hospital, it was state-of-the-art, cutting-edge technology with all of the supplies at the door of the rooms. It was an amazing day. I was there in the audience at the ribbon cutting for that new hospital.

That hospital has many happy memories – I had three children in there – and some sad memories. I said goodbye to some dear friends that were there, some elderly folks, and I even had a chance to work there and my husband worked there.

For a government that says they are billions of dollars in infrastructure deficit, we cannot discard a piece of infrastructure that is still viable. It can’t be

useful one day and ready for the wrecking ball the next.

Maybe we needed a new hospital. Well, we did need a new hospital, and thank you for that, but that doesn’t mean that the old hospital is garbage. If it can’t be used as a hospital, surely it can be used as something else with all of the things that we need in the Northwest Territories.

Let’s list off a few of the things that we send our residents south for: drug detox, alcohol treatment, diabetes treatment and education for families. And we have a growing number of seniors in the Northwest Territories. Surely those nice rooms all with a washroom would make excellent studio-type suites for seniors and that is not something that would require a lot of staff.

This building, in my opinion, can be re-profiled. I know the government gets nervous when we talk about that because all they see is the dollar signs and all the money that it’s going to cost, but we need to get real about our infrastructure here in the North.

We watched Doctors Without Borders on television treating people and providing medical care in grass huts. I mean, we have a building there that works. It’s functional. It’s operational. It’s viable.

I would like to today ask if this government could strike a committee with the Hay River’s Interagency to brainstorm, to come up with some ideas and if the Department of Public Works and Services can do a comprehensive, technical review of this facility so we know exactly what we’re working with and if there’s something that we can re-profile it into that’s useful to the North and to Hay River. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We all can speak of our elders here in this House and today I’d like to send a hello out to Mrs. Helen Kinnison in Hay River. I think of her today as I was thinking of something that I could wear to match my jacket and I found the necklace and earrings that she made for me about 20 years ago, which are made out of fish bones from fish out of Great Slave Lake that are dyed and were put together in jewelry.

So I’d like to say hello to Helen today, and I’d also like to thank all of the amazing, talented artisans in the Northwest Territories who create so many beautiful things for us. Thank you

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I join my colleagues in recognizing Pink Shirt Day. We’re taking a stand against bullying by wearing pink today.

Pink Shirt Day had unlikely beginnings. It started with a spontaneous protest in 2007 following a bullying incident in a Nova Scotia high school. A ninth grade male student had been bullied for wearing a pink shirt, and in a gesture of solidarity, two older boys bought 50 pink shirts and gave them away to fellow students. To the organizers’ surprise, the protest made national headlines. Shortly afterward, provincial Premiers began to designate Pink Shirt Day as an official day against bullying.

Bullying describes a number of acts of aggression: swearing or shouting, punching or shoving, spreading rumours, engaging in nasty practical jokes or invading someone’s privacy. The effects of bullying are devastating and can last a lifetime. In extreme cases, even suicide can result.

The 2010 Minister’s Forum on Aboriginal Student Achievement and, more recently, the National Health Survey on School-Aged Children told us that students and families in the Northwest Territories are severely affected by bullying.

But there is good news, Mr. Speaker. Bullying is being taken seriously across the country and in our jurisdiction as well. Anti-bullying activities are in full swing, in part because of anti-bullying legislation that this Assembly passed in 2013. The Department of Education, Culture and Employment has launched a campaign to convey one clear message: bullying is never acceptable. Students in schools are pledging to stand up and stop bullying and also compete for prizes by creating videos, photos and art.

It will take a collective effort to stop bullying and we are on the road to change, but we’re not there yet. So I am joining my colleagues in calling on every single person in the Northwest Territories to stand up against bullying. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Oh, the list could go on. I try to focus on the positive, and these are good projects and they tide us over from year to year and season to season and they provide good infrastructure. But the problem is that if Hay River is truly the hub of the North, we cannot afford the erosion of those things that make Hay River what it is. Those things are the lake, the river, the rail, the road.

Right now, to get a bunch of train cars from High Level to Hay River, because of a lack of investment in the infrastructure for the rail, you can go 10 kilometres an hour. It takes two days to get from High Level to Hay River.

I know it’s not our government’s responsibility to put capital money into the rail bed, but as a government we certainly have an opportunity to talk to companies like CN Rail to talk about what are we going to do about that.

We cannot afford the erosion of those things that are foundational to what Hay River was built on and those things that are the underpinning of the economy that we will generate if those are there. The problem is the erosion of those things.

I join my colleague from Hay River North today to talk about dredging again. Whether it’s for Canadian Coast Guard, Canadian Coast Guard has the west coast, the east coast and the Great Lakes and Hay River. That’s an inland harbour in Hay River and that’s been a mainstay of our economy, having that inland harbour. When visitors come to Hay River, they see those big ships sitting down there and they go, oh, my gosh, I never dreamt there was an inland harbour in Hay River like this. It is there; it’s exciting; it’s wonderful; but it’s soon not even going to be able to take a fishing boat, a recreational boat, or a Canadian Coast Guard vessel out of the harbour in Hay River because we haven’t done the dredging. Again, the government says, hey, not our issue, not our problem.

So, yes, thank you for the good things you do. Thank you for the government jobs. Thank you for the government infrastructure. But we need some help with the underpinning foundational things in Hay River that make it what it is, and that is the transportation hub of the North. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My Member’s statement yesterday was two and a half minutes but it seemed to be like two and a half seconds, so I wanted to take this opportunity… I’m going to break from my colleagues on the education and I want to talk about one of my favourite subjects again today: Hay River. One I really don’t need any notes to talk about.

I pride myself in being a very optimistic person. I’m not pessimistic. When people say, oh, gloom and doom, I go, hey, look it, think about that nice $35 million mid-life retrofit to the Diamond Jenness Secondary School. Think about that new $65 million hospital we’re going to open here soon. Think about that $10 million for extended care beds that we’re going to be building in Hay River soon. I always try to focus on the positive.

---Interjection

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is an interesting topic and certainly I, like my colleagues, am very concerned for the safety of our workplaces in hospitals and care facilities and all facilities in the Northwest Territories. Safety in the workplace has to be a paramount concern.

Some other Members have referred to many incidents and I don’t know if that would be a fair characterization because I don’t know the numbers of incidents involved. I think back to just a few weeks ago when there was an incident on Parliament Hill and the good members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, right after that incident, put two police officers on the driveway here at the Legislative Assembly in response to that one incident that occurred on Parliament Hill. I bring up that because it is indicative to me that I don’t think that that’s the kind of response that we can afford to some isolated incidents at Stanton Territorial Hospital.

I think we need a broader take on a safe workplace. We need to look at perhaps enclosed areas. I know people in Justice that deal with probation services and deal with probation clients and so on, when they are dealing with certain clients there is a safe place to go where they are protected. So I think we need to look at this in a broad context.

When this came up in committee, I mentioned that I don’t think we have enough money, enough resources to prepare for people in every place in every space where there’s an inevitability, where there’s a possibility, even a relatively high possibility, of something occurring. Mr. Nadli mentioned the psychiatric ward or the emergency ward and I think we have to be realistic. I’m going to try to be realistic about this. I don’t think that we can have people that are solely dedicated to security that are at a place, at a workplace 24/7 in case something happens. I think there may be a way, though, when we look at this in the broader context, there may be a way of enabling, equipping, training, preparing people to respond to an emergency that are already in the workplace. I don’t know who those people might be, but I think we need to take a really multi-faceted approach to this issue of safety in the workplace. I just don’t think we should set our hearts on something that isn’t reasonably affordable or sustainable or fair, because we are talking about very specifically, in this motion, Stanton Territorial Hospital.

As I said also in committee, we have drugs and alcohol and problems with violence in every community in the Northwest Territories. We have nurses attending nursing stations by themselves in a community with no RCMP presence and they are dealing with people, the same kinds of issues, everything from A to Z. It’s not the concentration and the traffic and the volume of people you’d be dealing with at a territorial facility like Stanton, but it is still individual cases where those particular employees of ours could be at some risk.

So, I think we need to discuss this. I think we need to consider recommendations that have come out as a result of inquiries. I just don’t think that having dedicated security people in one facility, in one community is the answer to the problem. I think we need to take a broader view of this and I will support this motion in the hopes that – it is a recommendation – it will lead to more discussion about this. But I just want to say that I’m concerned about the safety in the workplace of all of our health care workers, of all of our GNWT workers, but certainly in areas where there’s a higher risk of potential harm. I think we need to take a very broad approach to how we can implement things to protect the interests of those folks that are serving us in those places. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d also like to take this opportunity to recognize a former Tuktoyaktuk resident but a resident of Hay River, Julie Trennert. She’s done many, many things, but I would like to also say that she and her daughter Brendalynn are outstanding, renowned artisans. Thank you.