Thank you.
I'd like to address my questions to the two people from NAN.
Before I became a member of Parliament two and a half years ago, I was an emergency room doctor for 17 years in Thunder Bay. Back then you didn't have your program of virtual mental health services. I'm happy to hear you started that, but I want to ask you about the in-person services. I gather you've applied for funding for that, but as of yet you have not received it.
I shouldn't tell you a story, because whatever I say doesn't get in as witness testimony; it's your testimony that does. Working in the Thunder Bay emergency room for a lot of years, there were a number of people who I got to know pretty well because they were pretty consistently in the emergency room. They were people who were homeless, had alcohol addiction problems and were from NAN communities. When I saw them repeatedly and they had increasingly high levels of alcohol, it was pretty clear to me that if something wasn't done quickly, they wouldn't be coming in anymore. It happened pretty frequently with the homeless people that you got to know them, but eventually you'd hear that one of them had died. It was almost always related to alcohol.
I have to say, Thunder Bay emergency didn't do a very good job with these people. Maybe they're doing a better job in the last couple of years, but as far as I know, we did very little. I don't know what addiction and mental health services were available. Detox certainly exists. The nursing stations in the communities exist and there are treatment programs, but I would occasionally phone up the nursing station from the communities these people came from and suggest they should think about flying them back up to their community to try to straighten them out before it was too late. Often, that was the case.
Could you tell me a little bit about what existing programs are available for such people from your communities—often, they're down in Thunder Bay—in order to address their addiction and mental health problems?