EdinburghNLP/nunavut-hansard-plusplus huggingface dataset:
For their own safety, we ship them out of the territory where the services are provided.
So that’s a few more reasons why we would do that, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Campbell. Mr. Ningark.
Under H-5, I would like to ask a question about a service status lacking in Kugaaruk and it is in regard to a shelter.
I don’t like the Inuktitut term for it, but I’m talking about a shelter.
Can I ask that question under H-5, Mr. Chairman?
I believe so. Minister Curley.
I believe that’s under H-4. We had recently made a departmental policy on this financial issue.
The member is more than welcome to ask me any questions at all. I didn’t hear the question.
I would like to raise the matter of elders, women in particular.
When spousal assault occurs in the home, the children are usually witnessing the incident where the father beats their mother.
When this occurs, most women and their children flee to their other relatives’ homes and then the families that accommodate these victims are then placed in a dangerous situation since the aggressive spouse may turn on them.
Some victims are sent out to other communities by social workers due to the dearth of local facilities.
It’s quite obvious that if we had shelters in communities, then they wouldn’t have to be sent to another community. This then becomes a hurdle to those who are trying to resolve the issues, or counselling the spouses to address their issues, or conducting family sessions.
If communities had crisis shelters, then it would alleviate some of the problems we currently face.
I’m sure that this situation and its possible solutions have already been discussed. As I stated, a petition with 150 signatures was submitted to resolve this matter in our community.
I would like the minister to take this to heart.
When spouses are sent out of the community and time passes, the spouse then returns to the community when the parties have agreed to reconcile.
If the community had a local facility, the reconciliation process could be dealt with locally as long as the situation is not too dangerous.
We may require a security company or a secure facility with proper staffing so that the victims are not placed in a dangerous situation.
I’m sure that there are some communities that have had success in this area.
Perhaps Mr. Campbell or the minister can respond. Either of you or your staff may answer my line of questioning.
That’s more of a capital question, but if the minister would like to answer.
With respect to the financial aspect of the operations, we are already supporting existing facilities through funding. We have also increased the funding for these types of facilities based upon the Tamapta Action Plan. We have been directed to assist people undergoing crises during our cabinet retreat in Cape Dorset.
At this time, in the Kitikmeot region, there are three existing shelters; in Taloyoak, there is a facility with six beds; in Cambridge Bay, there is a facility with four beds available; and another shelter with six beds exists in Kugluktuk.
After our current amendments to the Act, we allocated further funding increases for these facilities for this upcoming fiscal year to ensure that the operations of these facilities can be funded and it’s not just their furniture or other equipment being funded.
If a community is able to purchase a unit, then we can offer some operational funds to assist the communities. That is the reason why this petition that you tabled is quite important and we will be referring to that petition when reviewing possible improvements to this situation, especially as it relates to a future facility in your area.
We will be taking that into consideration.
I wanted to let the member know that we will be reviewing the matter and that there will be a formal response to the petition, but I’m just providing a verbal response at this time.
I have a very brief statement, Mr. Chairman. I don’t want to condone the separation of families when I refer to crisis shelters and I’m not trying to say that either.
We are a government and we ought not to divide any families as one of our principles is healthy families both as a territory and separate communities. We all have our ideas as to what constitutes healthy families.
I would not want to have my comments taken out of context or misunderstood and that is why I made this comment. I don’t have a question, Mr. Chairman.
I guess there was no question there, so we will go to the next one.
In terms of keeping in line with these questions, how many children are actually fostered in the territory?
I alluded to the report and I’m sure my colleague read the report in full which I tabled in the fall session.
In that report, there is a director’s report which is a mandatory report that should be tabled in the legislature.
It indicated there are over 300 foster children currently Nunavut.
It probably varies every month because some are short term and some are long term, which my deputy explained, that would require specialized services either in or outside of Nunavut.
But averaging, in my view, this year, there were over 300 foster children, the majority of which were in local communities but were cared for by foster parents.
Mr. Elliott: I just have a question about the clock.
Did I take four minutes to ask my last question?
Chairman: I don’t think so, but I guess we forgot to reset it. You can just carry on.
I would like the minister to tell us how many children are actually fostered outside of Nunavut.
I suppose that is question number two. One was throughout Nunavut and the second part is outside of Nunavut. I’ll have my deputy minister respond to that.
As of February 24, we have 60 who were fostered outside of Nunavut.
How much does it cost to foster these children outside of Nunavut?
There’s no doubt that varies because some of them are specialized and some of them are more routine, and so on, but I’ll have the deputy explain the details.
Currently, our projection is at $6.1 million to foster kids outside of the territory.
Just to bring it back to page H-5, is that under Contract Services?
I’m assuming the Government of Nunavut pays them through… as the minister said, some are actually contract services, but the people who are actually foster parents, what line item does that payment come out of?
Mr. Chairman, I’ll have our Corporate Director explain that, Debora Voth.
The foster payments are made out of the Purchased Services line item and the contract services for residential care in the south would be paid out of the Contract Services line.
In terms of the travel for these children and probably their escorts to go because they’re underage, is that under the Travel and Transportation section?
Madam Voth will explain that.
Yes, the travel costs are paid out of the transportation and travel line.
In terms of social workers working in a community, I just had a question about how many contract social workers we have in the territory right now.
My deputy will explain that, Mr. Campbell.
As of January 31, we had 46 social worker positions, out of which 29 are filled with indeterminate staff, two are beneficiaries, 17 of these positions are vacant, 12 are currently filled by casual staff, and 1 is filled with an agency social worker.
The reason I was asking those questions is I know one of the topics that keeps coming up is the idea of how many contract workers we actually have in Nunavut and at the same time, one of the concerns is about training nurses and social workers.
I know in Arctic Bay, we have a social worker who was trained and was out in Cambridge Bay.
Through our discussions, Mr. Arvaluk mentioned that there was a social worker in Pond Inlet who is not working, who went through training through Nunavut Arctic College.
The member from Pangnirtung has two people as well.
Why are these people not being hired if we have contract workers from outside the territory being hired?
I cannot really speak for the individuals and probably a good way would be to find out exactly why.
I’m not sure whether they have applied or not. I know some of the top-notch businesspeople throughout Nunavut who have trained to be probably like him, who would train in a particular profession but chose to do other things.
Maybe they didn’t apply.
If they had applied, surely, I would ask the same question why they are not employed.
If the member is able to help me that they did apply, that would enable me to find out exactly why the government did not honour their application. But if they have not applied, as the minister, I can’t really follow that up.
In terms of the social safety net programs, I know there is some joint work between your department and EIA. Could you explain how your two departments are working together?
My deputy, Mr. Campbell, will respond to that.
As a follow up to the report card as well as Tamapta priorities, the government has decided to set up a number of deputy ministers’ committees. I’m going to be chairing one deputy ministers committee on quality of life.
That includes, as a priority area, the social safety net. That’s one priority area that we need to look at. The other one is poverty reduction and the other one is housing.
Under that deputy ministers’ committee, there are six deputies participating who are affected in those departments who are providing guidance and assistance in that committee.
There will be some committee work provided as well as a result of that process and the departments will be leading the work involved in that.
As an example, the work on the social safety net would be led… right now, it’s still under discussions. We haven’t finalized who is going to be taking the lead, but EIA is going to be taking the lead coordination with a number of departments working under it, including Health and Social Services, CLEY, and Justice working under that banner, to identify the initiatives that we need to implement under Tamapta.
In the government’s 2010-11 Budget Address, Minister Peterson, under the section of those at risk, said that $1.5 million would be invested into child protection programs.
I’m just wondering if he could explain what the child protection programs are that he is talking about.
That’s the project that I announced earlier in the House today which really involves reviewing the Child and Family Services Act.
We need that amount of dollars to consult with Nunavutmiut in a variety of ways, including our partners in Inuit organizations and other organizations that are connected with those kinds of services throughout Nunavut. We estimated that it will cost about that much to be able to finalize the final report.
The $1.5 million is to be spent over two years.
How much does your department plan to spend of the $1.5 million this year?
I’ll have the deputy minister explain the breakdown of that.
I would say that it will be split between the two fiscal years.
Once the budget is approved, we have asked for $600,000 for the fiscal year 2010-11 and then $900,000 the following year.
There will be public consultation and community engagement. I know that’s what the minister said from his Minister’s Statement earlier today.
How many communities will be consulted? Will it be all communities across Nunavut?
Surely, I think it would be ideal to reach all communities, but realistically, we probably will not be visiting all communities. The communities that have more social interaction and maybe less economic activities will definitely be consulted.
We would like to try and be fair, that we at least consult the representative communities that are actively involved with family services, and so on. I would say that the majority of the communities will be consulted.
Have you actually determined which communities will be consulted with or visited?
Not yet at this moment. We are in the process of working out the action plan. We have scoped out some of the action plan that we have, but we have not finalized it yet.
Once that is done, I’ll be pleased to circulate that to my colleagues in a formal letter if the House is not sitting.
I wanted to go back to talk about the social workers again for a second. In terms of their role in the community, I know they work hard and work hard at the job that they’re doing. Some of them actually have the added responsibility of being the probation officer.
Is this going to continue this year or is that going to be put onto the Department of Justice?
With respect to the probation responsibility, my colleague, the Minister of Justice, and I have had initial discussions on that. There are a number of positions that are taken as dual responsibilities.
To be realistic, within the government, we cannot transfer all of the functions all at once. What we did agree to is that we may have to do it in stages. We have transferred some.
In terms of the actual numbers, I’m not in a position to do that.
I think my colleague, the Minister of Justice, will likely be the one who will lead exactly how many he can take on.
That work is yet to be finalized, but initially, we have said that we’re going to have to probably do it in phased basis.
I was going to let some of my other colleagues ask questions.
I would like to refer to an issue that was brought up already and it’s in regard to our children, boys and girls.
Whenever a child has to be taken from their home in our communities, what we would prefer to see is to have them remain in our community instead of being sent out as long as they are in a safe environment.
We all know how much better that is at any time
When children are sent out of the community, they usually have problems reconnecting with their own family when they come back to their community.
I would prefer having them in their own community because it makes it a lot easier for the child to stay in touch with their family.
The children might not be in their parent’s home, but they would be in the same community and not disconnected completely.
When there’s total disconnection, children have a hard time readjusting when they come back and there’s a disconnection in the family unit. We have known this for a long time.
The children who were sent out to residential schools had the same problem reconnecting with their family.
If and when it was at all possible, I prefer to see them staying in the community. Before they get old, it’s a lot better to have them in an outpost camp.
It keeps them intact with the Inuit culture and language.
The reason why I’m speaking today is when a child is apprehended and from what I have seen in my community… and because we have three workers, they have set up a system where if it’s a non-Inuk, they would use the non-Inuk culture and if it was an Inuk or a beneficiary, they would use the traditional system.
What we see is foreign laws being applied to our communities.
Sending children outside of the territory is not good. I know the social service workers are just using their policies, but we have to make sure that the policies are made in Nunavut instead of coming from outside the territory.
I know that all of the social service workers are working toward the same goal.
What we’re seeing now is that the people of the communities don’t want their children sent out and that outsiders working in the communities want them to be sent out.
We have to make sure that the people coming in from the outside are oriented in the traditional values to make sure that they know the cultural aspects and the traditional laws, and to give them orientation right at the beginning.
We all feel when the family hub is broken. When children are apprehended and sent out, it becomes harder to reconnect after they have been out for a while or to make any changes.
It is not a question, but I wanted to make that statement, Mr. Chairman.
I guess there is no question there.
I don’t have anybody else on the list here, so we will go to H-5.
Total Operations and Maintenance, to be Voted. Social Services. Branch Summary.
Chairman: We will move to H-6. Health and Social Services.
Branch Summary. Public Health. Total Operations and Maintenance, to be Voted. $9,686,000.
Chairman: We will move to H-7 then. Branch Summary. Health and Social Services.
Treatment. Total Operations and Maintenance, to be Voted. $157,063,000. Member for Nanulik.
It sure feels good to have the Chair to ask questions.
As Members of the Legislative Assembly, we often hear concerns from our constituents about the care and treatment that they receive at their community health centres.
I stated yesterday that one very common complaint is that clients are just told to take Tylenol and come back again at another time.
There were a couple of occasions in my home community that had fallen victims of the same actions.
Both of them ended up being medevaced out either later that day or the following day and were very seriously in need of a doctor.
None of us in this House, members or witnesses, are doctors or health professionals, so we cannot judge whether or not this is an appropriate response from health centre staff. We also recognize that it is not our place as MLAs or bureaucrats to come between medical professionals and their patients when it comes to a diagnosis in terms of care or treatment and follow-up.
However, complaints such as the one I just described come up again, again, and again.
Can the minister describe the basic levels of training, qualifications, and experience required for health professionals hired to work in Nunavut’s community health centers?
Chairman: Thank you, Member for Nanulik.
That’s a very tough question to respond to because however or whichever angle we respond to it, there’s always another question that follows up.
The particular type of question that he asked, I think, is a similar question that can be raised from all constituencies and communities throughout.
What we, in the department, try to do is to address case-by-case complaints. I don’t think there is a generic kind of complaint problem that can answer to each community at all. So we, in the department, try to address each complaint as they come in independently and specifically deal with a particular question.
There are many that do not reach the headquarters level.
I share the member’s concern that we could probably do a lot more and a lot better to be more sensitive and culturally responsive to the elders as well as to those who are in very serious medical situations.
The reason I’m responding in that fashion is because it’s a question that my deputy minister and the senior level in the government continue to address every day.
We may have to find a way to put complaints or problems related directly at the community level instead of handling them outside of local communities, but that involves a whole lot of searching for ideas on how best to deal with these kinds of problems that tend to occur in communities. It’s a challenge that we deal with and face every day.
Mr. Chairman, to be fair in responding, I would like the deputy to add to some of the comments that I made because it’s an overwhelming question that the member just raised.
Just to supplement the response from the minister, we are very challenged as a government and our department is no different in attracting qualified, experienced health care workers to work in our communities.
I should say, though, before I proceed that we do appreciate the expertise and the help that we get from our health practitioners and nurses at the frontline level.
I think that we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the good work that’s going on in Nunavut. I know that’s not the intent of the question, but I think it’s important to reinforce that we do appreciate that the people who work for the Government of Nunavut have worked hard.
That being said, we do look for registered nurses to work in these communities. We are looking for people who are qualified nurses. We look at areas such as the number of years that nurses have worked in small communities.
We look at areas of cultural sensitivity, whether those individuals have worked in a remote aboriginal or Inuit setting.  So we do have a tiered system of how we screen applications when they come knocking on our door to express an interest.
As I said yesterday, we are very challenged in trying to find particularly nurses to work in our communities.
In the last year and a half, as I said earlier, we have recruited 61 nurses into the system since we started the nurse recruitment and retention program, but keep in mind, there were 25 that left the system, so the net is about 36 nurses that we have hired. I think that’s tremendous work that the government and the department have undertaken to attract people first of all to Nunavut.
The comment that has been made and the question that has been raised are not new to the department.
Yes, the minister acknowledged that there are always concerns raised by mayors in the Kivalliq and mayors more recently in the Baffin, expressing a concern that there needs to be more culturally sensitive workers working in the communities.
It is something that we support and something that we are trying to adhere to as we deliver health care services.
As the minister is aware, nurses in our communities are our only contact for our medical concerns oftentimes.
If we’re lucky enough, we could end up having a visiting doctor in place to look at the patients right then and there when they do come by for help.
To be told to just take Tylenol and go home and if you get worse, show up the following day, it shouldn’t have to be acceptable, especially in cases where it has shown that these patients ended up being medevaced out the following day.
Can the minister describe how his department monitors the performance of health professionals working in Nunavut’s community health centres?
I said earlier in my response to the first question that we deal with complaints on a case-by-case basis.
I said earlier that we don’t have a generic solution for every complaint that may or may not come in, but I believe that the nurses that we have are qualified individuals who have gone through rigorous training and have passed their national requirements, as the deputy minister explained earlier.
We don’t have an evaluation system just for evaluating whether or not the nurses are actually performing as required.
That’s something that the supervisors probably would have to do if the performance evaluations are required.
In terms of evaluating the quality of care in communities, I don’t think we have particular procedures in place to deal with that.
I can only continue to say that if there are problems that develop in communities with particular patients and if a complaint does come forward through a community or an individual, we respond to them privately and we take into consideration the privacy and medical ethical issues that are involved in bringing that particular kind of medical condition to the department.
These are very sensitive and in some cases, very overwhelming.
What I will say is that we will continue to respect individuals’ right to treatment and we do that with a commitment.
We may need to be more sensitive in some cases. The deputy minister indicated earlier that we could always improve in that area and we will continue to ensure that we have communicated that to the nurses in each community.
I have certainly communicated that desire to the director of medical affairs and I would like the deputy to add further to that, Mr. Chairman.
We do take those concerns very seriously, Mr. Chairman.
About a year and a half ago, we did hire a chief nursing officer because of those types of complaints that we have been receiving over the years.
We recognized that as a process where we can take some of these issues and the person who can do some of the initial assessment and investigation into some of these concerns.
So we have a chief nursing officer now who has been working in the department.
He is also working with the nurses as well as Dr. McDonald in this case, the Director of Medical Services, to coordinate their efforts to develop policy and procedure manuals for each of the health centres that need to be developed and updated on a regular basis. We also have started a quality assurance process in the department, where complaints are now reviewed by the department when these issues come in.