As you know, every family deals with this issue. No matter what colour, age, gender, whatever, everybody has a problem within the family. There are no boundaries for addiction issues. What I did in my community was, we did on-the-land and had Poundmaker's come in and do the program for six weeks. We did that three times, plus we also brought them in for aftercare.

I firmly believe that a full-service addictions centre is required for the Northwest Territories. What I mean by "full-service" is that you have the proper staff, staff who are trained to deal with all of the different traumas that happen within families and within people's lives that have made this happen to our people.

We can still do the on-the-land programs within the communities, but there are some cases that are past that sometimes and have mental issues. There are mental issues involved, and I think that we need a territorial addictions centre in the Northwest Territories also.

It was a very successful program, the Fort Smith on-the-land program. We had the whole team, including a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a full team from Poundmaker's that came to Fort Smith and did the six-week program. Everybody was entitled to that in the Northwest Territories with the way that the funds were done from the Department of Health and Social Services here. Not everybody took advantage of it. I don't know how people felt about it, but I know that the programs that we did with Salt River were open to all of the community. We did not say it was only for Salt River; we had members from all of the communities who came to the on-the-the land program.

I know that we need an addictions centre in the Northwest Territories, and I mean a full-service one, where testing is involved, because not all addictions centres have that. I know that aftercare is extremely important. I know that we have many problems with this in all of the communities. I know that there is a problem here in Yellowknife. You walk down the main street, and there are problems.

It is a big issue, and it has to be looked at by everyone around this table to correct the situation, to try and deal with the issue, to feel for the people who are suffering from addiction and from mental health issues. Thank you.

[Translation] Thank you. This issue is a big one. When we talk about addictions for the Northwest Territories, we have this issue in all of the 33 communities. They are our relatives. How can we help them? Sometimes, even though they talk to us about their issues, we don't know how to help them. There are a lot of issues and concerns about treatment centres. We did have treatment centres at one time, and they closed.

We also talk about aftercare programs, and we don't have enough of that. Once people come back from treatment, they don't know how to be helped, even though they were in treatment for a whole month. They return back to their communities, and the pressure of friends and family is really strong, and they go back to their old ways. We need to have an aftercare program for them, programs for them in the community. I think we need to have everything in place for them once they return from their treatment.

When I made my speech, my Premier's speech, I mentioned about working with elders and on the land. Bringing the youth out on the land is an important one. We also look at homelessness, people who don't have any housing, and some of them have addictions. If we work with the elders, we take them on the land, they are the most skilled people that you can think of, when you take them out on the land, and they are the happiest when they are out on the land. They are respected on the land, because they know the skills.

Once they return from the south, they don't have an aftercare program. I think we need to review this whole issue of addictions and how we can help our people, especially the idea of on-the-land programs. A lot of young people are sleeping on the streets. Let's pick them up. Some of these people are the most skilled on the land. I have a lot of people who live on the street, myself. Fifteen years ago, we never heard of anyone being homeless, but now, today, a lot of the issues, we can see that. It's visible in the community.

I want to bring my people back home, because they are the most skilled on the land. Because of their addiction, either drugs or alcohol, it's stronger, and they have no housing, as well. As a government, I think we need to take a look at this. With the elders' advice, we can create an on-the-land program to help our people. Even in the Sahtu region, they have a justice program that is working. We tried it; it's a pilot project. It was running very well at one time, and when the government changed, that program changed, as well. We can review that program again, and I'd like to thank the MLA from Inuvik for asking that question. Masi. [End of translation]

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.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have to say I agree with much of what Ms. Cochrane said. You know, we all know people who you would like to get help for, but they're not in a position where they want to go get help. You know, it's such a difficult situation when you look at it, when you know those kinds of people. When you walk downtown. So what do we do? Is it the aftercare? Is it the treatment? No, I agree that it is mental health, but how do we provide that? How do we get there early enough?

This is one of those issues that is so broad, that cuts across so many government departments, that it needs the participation of the Indigenous governments and the community, the community governments, families, everyone involved. So, if this is something that this Assembly wants to tackle, I would like to see us do it whole-heartedly. You know, I know there are mental health and addiction strategies, but are those effective? Have we seen a decrease? We still have the worst rates in the country, basically. Probably some of the worst rates in the developed world.

We can't do this by half measures. If we want to go in, we have to go all in. That's why next week is going to be tough. We want infrastructure projects, but we want to help people, as well. Mental health, there are a lot of communities, there are a lot of mental health workers. There are a lot of communities, there is a lot of aftercare. There's a lot of housing that we need.

I commend Salt River with partnering with Poundmaker's. I think they have a great program, and maybe that's something we need to do more of, is going to the people who know how to provide treatment and partnering with them. Because the GNWT, more and more I wonder whether or not we need to rely on their expertise. Sometimes we need to go outside and partner with people who are actually doing this work.

So it's a big question. There are a lot of moving parts, and it's going to take a bit commitment. Do I have a plan? No. Does anyone here really have a plan? No, it's going to take more than just us in the room to come up with a plan and really address this, but just take a walk down the street and you'll see why it needs to be done. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon to my colleagues. I would like to thank the candidates for putting your names forward for Premier. All the best to each of you. My question is related, I guess, to the mental health and self-esteem type of issue. It's basically regarding the workforce, the make-work programs.

The people of the North need work. Optimism is about giving hope to the people for a better future. I'm talking about the immediate future, like tomorrow. For the people of the North, work equals much-needed income. Providing work develops happy people, happy families, and most of all improves a person's self-esteem, which I believe is much-needed.

Providing work equates to stimulating local economies. This is a win-win situation. In the past, funds have been secured from the federal government to create the much-needed work programs for all the communities of the Northwest Territories. It has been done. With that in mind, I ask the question of all the Premier-candidates: what is your strategy to securing that type of funding to stimulate the economy of the communities of the North? Mahsi.

Masi, Mr. Chair. [Translation] Those of us in the smaller communities, I totally agree with what he is saying, it is very difficult to find jobs and employment, and it is because of that that puts people in a situation. We also talk about mental health and self-esteem. When people do not have a job, it interferes with the way they are thinking. They created these programs in the communities before, and money was flowing to the communities at that time. Maybe it is something, that kind of program, we should take a look at again, those of us in the smaller communities. [English translation not provided.]

[Translation] As I said just a little while ago, on the community employment, if we all work together on how we are going to make more employment in the communities, in our community, we have community friendship centres; we have to work with them in our community. Small community employments in the North are the ones that are helping the communities, to make them thrive again. There are also the security people that work at night. We have to work more for them, try out for them.

I know that Northwest Territories government and the Aboriginal government have to work with each other. I know that a lot of them have that issue in their communities. I know there are a lot of graduates, grade 12 graduates, even though they have graduated, they are still on the street. How can we help those kinds of young people? What type of work are they looking for? We have to think ahead for them. We have to tell them, "Try this, or try this." If we do not try anything different, it's always going to be the same, so I think we should all work together, sit and work together, to help resolve this issue. Where is the problem? Where is it that we need to help them with funding? What is the gender of people who have this problem? Small community employment is very important to the small communities in order to help themselves with this issue. Masi. [End of translation].

Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are a number of things that I think we should be doing. As I spoke about a few times now and in my speech, I talked about developing regional economic plans with our Indigenous governments so that every region has some industry, some infrastructure happening, and that we are conscious that we are spreading out the wealth amongst all of us.

A few things I have not talked about and I am going to bring forward now is apprenticeships. A year and a half ago, maybe almost two years ago, I was the housing Minister. I have had some portfolios. I kind of forget the timeline, but I was housing Minister for two years. My focus was really on getting people the skills so that they could maintain the houses versus pay a rent and get out, but one thing I heard in the back and I never got time to address -- because, foolishly, I thought I would keep that portfolio for four years and I realize that is not how politics works sometimes -- we only had, I believe it was, 15 apprenticeships in the whole of Housing, 33 communities and 15 apprenticeships. That is not okay. We as a government, if we are going to be taken seriously about giving work skills, then we need to actually bump that up and bring in more apprenticeship programs into our own, into the GNWT, before we go outside.

The other thing I will talk about is income support. I know that income support, like I said, we have productive choices now. I have talked in my speech about a guaranteed income so that people who are on long-term income support, instead of penalizing them, we will give them a guaranteed income, and then they can actually have more incentive to actually look for other work and they will not get penalized dollar for dollar from their money. However, the other thing that we need to look at is our productive choices. I heard within income support that, if people have diagnoses like mental health illnesses, then they do not have to do a productive choice, and I am okay with that.

However, I will share another story because Indigenous people are storytellers. I have an aunt. I don't have an aunt anymore. She has passed, my Aunt Marion. I do not know what her problem was. When I was young, Aunt Marion was older than me, and she had already had a mental illness, and so I do not know what it is. I cannot stand here and say, but she stayed on the farm with my grandma for years until my grandma passed away, and then she went into a home down in Alberta. I worried about her because she was a farm girl, so I went to see her, and Aunt Marion was in this facility. In that facility, they had a little greenhouse, and, every day, my aunt went down and watered the plants. That was her whole job, just watering plants. My Aunt Marion lived until, I think she passed away about 10, 15 years ago. She lived into old age, and she loved her job. She loved the work that she did. So I am not saying that we need to force people. I am saying that we need to open up our productive choices and make it open so that people can make choices based on what their wishes are.

The other thing that I want to talk about is our small employment fund. I believe it was $8 million I think we had gotten into the last Assembly for that. Again, we had a small community committee that oversaw that, and I was the Minister responsible for that funding. However, I started towards the end talking to the governments, the community governments, the Indigenous governments, because what I saw was that they had $8 million and they were hiring people to, "Drive that gravel truck into the community," so they were spreading out the money, you know, "Cut those logs and bring it to the elders," people were getting jobs, but they were not sustainable. That is not okay. So, towards the end of it, I had started to talk to the governments, to the people who were accessing that, and saying, "What about moving this into sustainable income, so, instead of just hiring that one person to haul your gravel from the gravel pit to the community for one time and that person gets money, what about looking at ways you can actually start your own gravel pit, that you can actually start a business on it? Instead of cutting wood for one elder and getting paid for that, what about starting it as a business and being able to sell it to other people?"

So I think we need to think out of the box again with the programs that we have. I said that earlier. We are going to have to make hard decisions. We have to make sure that our programs are meeting the intent. I do not think the answer is just throwing out free money and saying, "Here it is," because we will always be building dependency. Our goal should not be about building dependency. I don't believe in independent either because that is my father's side, that is more of a Caucasian side, with the white picket fence. My mother's side would say "interdependent." So we need to rely on each other and support each other, but we need to make these employment programs sustainable in the long term, and I think that is the key. We need to look at our productive choices and we need to look in the government and see what we are doing to build the skills and the training. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for the question. There has been a lot of talk today about how do we build economies in small communities and in the regions, and I hope that this next Assembly joins me in focusing on regional empowerment. I think that we need to think about how to devolve not just government jobs, but also authority, to regions and communities, because once the people in the regions can start making decisions, they can start making decisions that actually work for them and that aren't just handed down. Some of those decisions might be about who gets funding to start a new business or things like that or who gets funding to Northern Farm Training Institute for training. Don't find a reason to put jobs in Yellowknife. Find a reason to put jobs in the communities and in the regions. It is easy to find reasons why not to do that. We need to task ourselves with finding reasons to do that.

We need to support people in the regions who want to do things for themselves. We heard some success stories from the Sahtu. I know of success stories in other small communities. The government, when they see that, needs to support that. The government doesn't have to do everything. If someone is doing something for themself, support that.

I think that we have to consider the fact that we may need to reconsider or reimagine what economies are in small communities. There are some small communities where their economy was the fur trade. Well, the fur trade isn't the way that it used to be. What do we do for that community? We are not going to shut it down and move it. Those days are long gone. So what do we do? Is it better to have people unemployed, because there are costs associated with that, or is it better to maybe subsidize a small industry where people are working? They are getting up, and they are going to work, which means that, when they get up, they are taking the kids to school. If they weren't getting up for work, maybe their kids weren't going to school.

I think that we need to start having those conversations, because the status quo isn't working. I think that we need some bold ideas, some ideas that might make us uncomfortable, but we have to try. The question of how we are going to access the federal funds is, again, partnerships. We need to build better partnerships with Indigenous governments and go together to Ottawa. I think that that is how you do it, and I have seen success stories around the territory when it is done that way. Again, it comes down to partnerships. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I think it is an excellent question, because I think that immediate action has to happen. What I am hearing from the Member is that make-work programs are necessary for employment, not study for another two years, but now. I think that we have to be creative in our thinking at our level to ensure that we accommodate those smaller communities and the regions to be able to actually do what we say we want to do, to spread the wealth to the smaller communities and the regions, to make sure that people have the choice of wanting to be able to be employed, whether it be in a fire smart program, whether it be planting trees, whether it be cutting wood. These are part of the green program, and you can get funds for that from the federal government to access it, but there is also the whole idea of the ITI programs that are under our departments. They have to be shared equally.

I find that, many times, you have Ministers or people in those departments who kind of dictate where the money is going to go. I think that we have to look at those very carefully to ensure that everybody has a fair share. I strongly believe that the smaller communities should have a say, especially the Indigenous governments. That is when they usually knock on the door, when there is no employment, when people don't have any food on the table, and during a crisis situation. Make-work programs are very important to the small communities.

On a larger scale, the regions have to be able to have the staff to be able to do that, to answer the call for help to the smaller communities. Lots of times in the past, at least, eight years now, that has not been happening. What has happened is that the strong central government has taken over and have left us in a bind where we cannot serve the communities. They have taken most of our senior staff away and left everybody kind of hanging. We cannot do that. We have to build those partnerships again. We have to ensure that we are serving all of the Northwest Territories equally. Thank you.

Thank you. My constituency has a large population of intoxicated and/or homeless population, and they are from all over the NWT. They are not only from Yellowknife. This was a huge issue during my campaign. There are a number of people who don't feel safe downtown because of the concentration of numbers. The GNWT and the city have worked together to provide services, but they don't seem adequate to the issue that they are trying to address there.

There has been an evaluation of the centre. It provides a bit of a blueprint for changes going forward, but my basic question is: what is the GNWT's responsibility for resolving outstanding issues downtown? What roles should the GNWT be taking in that? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am not quite familiar with the file as it is. I do stay downtown there, so I am very familiar with the situation, but I am not sure what the outstanding issues are and where the GNWT needs to step in, but this is an issue in a lot of places.

In Hay River, we had the high-rise close down, which means we now have people living on the street, a number of people who never used to before, and they are out and about, and there are sort of similar concerns, as well. You know, there is a role to be played.

I honestly don't know enough about the specifics of this issue, but it is a public safety issue, so we should probably be looking at partnerships, as well, with the City of Yellowknife. I would be happy to speak with the Member and help address this, no matter what my role is. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We have to realize that these people who are out on the street are members and people of the Northwest Territories. I think there has to be a bit more feeling in how we deal with this issue, because it is a very important issue when you have people on the street. Yes, they may be from mostly from all other communities, but I am sure that there are people on the street from Yellowknife also, right? We have to be more sensitive to the issue. I think that there has to be a solution, and we have to as a government look at the issue with the Member who brought it up and try to find solutions.

Some of these people have never gone back home for maybe many years. Maybe encouraging them and helping them to make that journey home and to reconnect with family might be one of the solutions. I think that we have to look at it in a holistic approach, to see what is best for not only the person on the street, but what is best for the community. I would ensure that we address the issue. Thank you.