SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Yellowknife MLAs took Health Minister Sandy Lee to task Tuesday over the non-renewal of respite care funding.

"The respite program provides much needed relief to 29 families in Yellowknife," said Frame Lake MLA Wendy Bisaro in the legislative assembly.

"The support they derive from the respite program impacts their lives in a very positive way and they fear losing the serenity just a few hours a week of respite brings to them."

The Frame Lake MLA went on to state that as a member of the government's social services committee she'd seen a review of the Department of Health and Social Services funding and had been under the impression the respite care program would receive an increase of $75,000, not get cancelled. She added the federal government has renewed the Territorial Health System Sustainability Initiative from which the respite care program was funded.

Lee said the federal initiative under which the $250,000 a year respite care program - run by the Yellowknife Association for Community Living - falls contains strict guidelines and each program competes for limited funds. She added the renewed federal funding initiative is smaller than the one it replaces.

Hearing the people

Weledeh MLA Bob Bromley called on Premier Floyd Roland for the creation of an ombudsman position on Tuesday.

This position would receive complaints from the public about problems with service delivery of territorial government programs.

For Bromley it is about using the public's concerns to identify inefficiencies in government programs. He pointed to the plight of university students attending classes in other jurisdictions who need to travel for medical purposes. The NWT medical travel program, however, only pays for travel from the Northwest Territories.

"The case of medical travel for students yesterday certainly demonstrated how sometimes program policies fly in the face of reason. The example also pointed out that although this lack of reason was brought forward in a case last year, another patient hit the same brick wall this year because no action was taken to learn from and fix the problem," said Bromley.

Roland said the government is open to the idea of creating an ombudsman position and he welcomed public feedback on how government programs can be improved.

"There are so many areas we are involved in that it is difficult to keep the pulse on all of it all the time," he said.

Deh Cho Bridge update

There's 100 trainloads of steel heading north for the Deh Cho Bridge project.

That's what Transportation Minister Michael McLeod told the legislative assembly in response to questioning from Kam Lake MLA Dave Ramsay on Tuesday.

"We expect to have a superstructure in by the end of March," said McLeod. "The Deh Cho Bridge is proceeding very well. Over the summer months we've achieved our targets for the summer construction."

The projected completion date for the bridge is November 2011. McLeod said 6,400 trucks per year would have to cross the bridge and pay the toll to allow the territorial government to break even on its debt payments for the $182 million bridge.

"For this coming year, we expect the traffic volume is going to be around 7,500 trucks or 8,000 and that's not counting any other new developments, such as the Gahcho Kue mine project," said McLeod. "There's also Seabridge, there's also MGM Minerals and there are other initiatives that are out there that we haven't factored in here."