Thank you, Mr. Chair. This one is dear to my heart, and so I'm going to take a different turn than the other speakers have taken.

I'd like to be able to say that addictions and homelessness, we can get a treatment centre, we'll get a treatment centre in every single community. You know I can't do that. We'll get a house for every person. Nobody will be homeless. I can't do that, either, right now. They key is that those aren't the answers. It's not addictions. People don't just drink because they like the taste of alcohol. People don't just end up homeless because they have nowhere to stay; they have families, they have other people.

We're talking about mental health. We're talking about self-esteem. My mother started drinking when I was seven years old. She never touched a drop before that. She had eight kids and an abusive husband, and there weren't the supports. I remember sitting down at the table when I was a young child, to this day, and she picked up a bottle of vodka, and she said, "If you can't beat them, join them." My mother never sobered up until all of us children left home; and she lost a kidney before she actually sobered up. It took almost losing her life.

So the answer isn't just getting addiction treatment centres, although we need them. We definitely need them. The answer isn't just getting houses, although we need them. We definitely need them. The answer is early intervention and dealing with people's wellness and their pride in themselves. If we can get more people some early intervention, early childhood development, parenting support, family support, pride in culture, taking them out when they're young, taking them on the land, those things all help.

When I was working at the Yellowknife Women's Centre, and like I said over 20 years and 15 years administrating non-profit organizations, the women that I dealt with -- in fairness, I never dealt with men. I dealt with women, but the women weren't saying, "I drank when I was 20 because I liked it," or, "I'm homeless because nobody will house me." The women were telling me, "I've been molested since I was three years old. Nobody loved me since I was a baby. I was in child protection and thrown out on the street when I was 16 years old." Those are the issues that we're dealing with, within that population.

So we can skirt around the issue and we can say that we're going to get treatment centres in the Territories, which we need. We're going to put people in houses, which we need. Until we deal with people's self-esteem, their mental wellness, we will always be putting Band-Aids on this. Pride in ourselves, family supports, early intervention, in my belief, is the answer. Thank you.