Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today to congratulate and applaud a local company who is doing their share to promote health in the north and that is Sutherland's Drugs, who stopped selling cigarettes earlier this fall. Mr. Speaker, Sutherland's felt that it was hypocritical for them to promote health as a drugstore and yet to be destroying health by selling cigarettes. The issue was why should they continue to sell cigarettes. Finally they decided that they should not. They decided they should be proactive.

Some of the factors they looked at in making this decision include that other drugstores have stopped selling them including Ring's Pharmacy in Hay River. Some provinces have actually instituted legislation against drugstores selling cigarettes. Also the mark up on cigarettes does not really cover the cost of selling them. In fact, they predict it will save them on their insurance costs because many break-ins today are by people in search of cheap cigarettes. Actually there is a local business that was just broken into for cigarettes and bars are often broken into for booze and cigarettes. Apparently, cigarettes are a hot item.

Mr. Speaker, the manager at Sutherland's Drugs has not noticed any direct detrimental effect because of the decision to stop selling cigarettes. In fact, they get a lot of positive comments and surprisingly most of the positive comments come from the people that used to buy cigarettes there. They claim they have not lost any customers from doing this and, in fact, it seems that people seem to shop there just as much as before, if not more often. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the Members here to join me in applauding Sutherland's Drugs for their move to stop selling cigarettes. Thank you.

--Applause