Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest yesterday as my colleague, Mr. Braden, had questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services and also his statement about alcohol and drug treatment residential facilities in the Northwest Territories. He put the question to the Minister and asked if it was an indication, that being our performance in the past four years, was an indication that residential alcohol and drug treatment facilities in the Northwest Territories are no longer a priority for our continuum of care. I think a lot of residents have that sense, Mr. Speaker. The Minister was very careful to point out that our strategy has been to focus attention at the community level, to make sure that we have adequate salaries for alcohol and drug workers so that we have more people willing to work in the field, and his opinion that it made sense to work more closely with the existing facilities that we have.

I think we all recognize that with our limited resources we're not going to see new dollars poured into capital. It isn't realistic to think that we're going to find bags of money or new treatment facilities, but that doesn't mean, Mr. Speaker, that we can't do something. We've got this serious need for residential treatment and I think it's at the same time that we're seeing falling custody numbers in all of our young offender facilities right across the territory.

The Department of Justice, I think, is indicating that they had a mere 21 young offenders in custody in the Northwest Territories as of September 15th. A lot of that is due in large part, Mr. Speaker, to the Youth Criminal Justice Act changes and our change in philosophy that came into being on April 1st of this year.

Mr. Speaker, I guess to sum it up, we really have made a decision not to incarcerate young people for many crimes if we don't have to. To try to deal with them in our communities, have community sentencing options, extrajudicial measures available for sentencing and this is a philosophy that certainly not everybody agrees with. I think maybe it's easier for us to stand here and say we have a more enlightened approach now and much more difficult if you've been a recent victim of a crime.

Mr. Speaker, this is a philosophy that will bear out over time as longitudinal studies show that incarcerating young offenders simply doesn't deal with the problem. Mr. Speaker, we've got these dwindling numbers in our young offender facilities and an increasing need for alcohol and drug treatment. I know the Department of Justice is looking at reprofiling some of our facilities. I think they've done so recently at the River Ridge Facility in Fort Smith. They've got a short term option they're looking at there, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.