A renewed healthcare agreement between the NWT and Ottawa includes support for expanding health services in communities – but does not directly address the territory’s longstanding concerns about insufficient funding for medical travel.
Territorial health minister Lucy Kuptana said she was meeting with federal Indigenous services minister Mandy Gull-Masty on Monday afternoon to discuss the Non-Insured Health Benefits (NIHB) program. There are a suite of concerns with the program and medical travel funding.
The GNWT administers the program on behalf of the federal government and continues to face cost overruns, Kuptana said at a Monday press conference in Ottawa, describing those overruns as “one of the conversations we’re going to have.”
Kuptana said the GNWT also wants to more authority to allow exemptions under NIHB for medical travel. Right now, the federal government has that decision-making power.
“Conversations about medical travel and the costs remain between the federal and territorial government, but we are working to deliver more services within community,” NWT MP and minister of Crown-Indigenous relations Rebecca Alty said at the press conference.
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Alty and federal health minister Marjorie Michel both said part of the answer is increasing access to services to cut down on the need for medical travel.
“We need to bring more services to the North, and then this question will disappear. So I think it’s by working together more closely – and improving the health that we are delivering in the North – that we will be able to face that challenge,” federal health minister Marjorie Michel said.
Alty pointed to a series of investments – including more than $4 million to refurbish an MRI room at Yellowknife’s Stanton Territorial Hospital, plus nearly $1.9 million to renovate a diagnostic suite in Inuvik and pave the way for a new CT scanner – that would make it easier to access healthcare in the NWT instead of travelling to Alberta.
Even so, medical travel remains necessary in many cases to get residents from isolated communities to better-equipped regional centres, the territorial capital or Edmonton.
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Money for new health centres
More broadly, Monday’s press conference saw the federal government and GNWT renew their “Working Together” bilateral agreement. It includes a $51.2-million investment over seven years.
The bilateral agreement highlighted the NWT’s healthcare priorities for the next four years. These include supporting culturally appropriate mental wellness and suicide prevention programs, strengthening mental health and substance use services, growing the healthcare workforce, and improving public health service coordination.
The ministers also announced 16 health infrastructure projects are being funded through the federal Build Communities Strong Fund.
The Government of Canada is contributing $70.2 million and the GNWT is contributing $23.4 million toward these projects.
They include a variety of building and medical upgrades, the creation of new health centres in Jean Marie River, Nahanni Butte, Tsiigehtchic, Wekweèti and Kakisa, and replacing the centre in Colville Lake.
At the announcement, ministers highlighted improvements in NWT healthcare. They asserted that since the last “Working Together” agreement was signed in 2023, the territory has reduced staff vacancies by 29 percent.
