Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Jan 30/02) - Provincial and territorial leaders issued a united call last week for Ottawa to bear its share of the growing burden of health care.

But Premier Stephen Kakfwi said building a more robust health care system involves more than restoring federal funding.

Premier Stephen Kakfwi: No magic pill to cure health care woes.

"We still have to look at how to manage costs simply because it's just getting too expensive," Kakfwi said following Friday's close of a premiers' conference in Vancouver.

Though health care dominated the agenda, Kakfwi said diamonds were the focus of informal meetings with Quebec and Ontario leaders.

"Ontario is very interested in getting more knowledgeable about the diamonds and the business of mining and secondary industry, and so is Quebec," Kakfwi said.

"We'll probably have some follow-up discussions down the road."

In terms of health care, the premier said, "the technology and research that is going on is providing more and more services that weren't available previously."

The territorial government is in as dire straits in terms of health care funding as any province.

There are higher levels of tobacco and alcohol use in the NWT than the rest of the country combined with a dreaded per-capita federal funding formula that fails to take into consideration the higher cost of providing health care in the North.

As it has for the provinces, the federal share of health funding has dwindled over the years from 50 percent to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 13 percent.

Following last week's conference, premiers called on Ottawa to return to a 50 percent share of funding for health care.