Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there has been a real growth, particularly in the southern part of the Northwest Territories, in the drug trade which has caused a need for greater resources in this region. We've seen a number of larger drug busts in Hay River, Yellowknife, and along the highway recently. That's certainly lead to some of the concerns. Further north, in the Delta, because of the oil and gas activity, there's been an increase, too, in crime. That's led to some of the changes. The ruling that we could no longer have single-person detachments has also caused us to have to increase staff over the past two years because we could no longer have detachments with just one member or leave detachments with one member when a member went on holidays or had to leave to attend court. What that has caused the RCMP to do is increase staffing in some areas so that they have people available to travel to communities when one of the officers is going to be away. So, for instance, somebody based in Inuvik now goes to Sachs Harbour or Paulatuk when one of the officers there is going to be away on holidays or on training. Before we would have had to remove the other officer that was in Paulatuk because you couldn't leave one officer alone.
So a lot of the increase has gone to make sure that we can continue with staffing in the smaller communities and to provide increased services to those communities without any staff at all. For instance, there has been a pretty significant increase in the number of visits this year to communities like Sachs Harbour that don't have resident RCMP at all, because the RCMP has been able to increase their staff in the Inuvik region. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.