Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am going to speak in favour of the motion. There are some aspects of it that I would like to lend some ideas or some observations to.

First, as Mr. Ramsay has said, I think most of us have encountered some kind of contact, direct or indirect, with the situation that's going on on the streets. I can relate at least to Yellowknife. In fact, just the other night, I was at an evening event at one of the highrise office buildings in downtown Yellowknife. As I left the building at about 8:30 or so, around the corner were four young people smoking up something and the bit of conversation I was able to catch, it looked like they were coaching or training one of their friends in how to use this particular drug. It's there. This was not in some alley snuck behind a building in an old construction site. This was very much in the glare of the streetlights and the parking lamps around this building.

In Yellowknife, Mr. Speaker, we've also seen a really disturbing trend, this phenomenon called the house party where somewhere along the line, someone's parents or family are out of town. Word gets around that there is a party in this house and, within minutes, thanks to the technology of cell phones, there can be over 100 people at this house. Mr. Speaker, this is not just a loud, noisy neighbourhood party, but what can we do to trash this house, to destroy it as quickly as we can. There is something remarkably disturbing and foreign to what we've come to know as peaceful communities.

Those are a couple of experiences that I know of late, Mr. Speaker, to the motion where it talks about establishing treatment centres. The Minister, Mr. Miltenberger, in response to some questioning over the last couple of days, has referred to the addictions and the Mental Health and Addictions Strategy that is in place. One of the fundamentals of this strategy is that we need to find solutions and approaches at the community level, in the environments in which the drug and alcohol culture exists and in which it is growing. As we have all talked about and worried about, the tendency that we seem to have here in the North when somebody comes forward for treatment is to ship them outside. Go to a southern institution for a dry-out program, a detox program or whatever. Then people come back into the community, probably more or less into the same environment that they came out of, where the influences of their friends, of crime, of life on the street are. How are they going to really be able to recover if this is the environment? We need to change things at the community and the street level, and this is where the motion -- and I entirely respect where my colleagues are going -- but the idea that we have to keep building facilities and keep putting up institutions, I hope that's not fully the intent here.

In fact the Somba K'e Healing Centre was put up with that specific direction and hope that it would indeed be a healing facility. It has fallen on tough times for a number of reasons that we don't need to go into and I don't even know if I understand all of them. But there is a multimillion dollar facility that is closed and, from my understanding, has deteriorated to the point it might not even be useful to anybody anymore. This has been a story of building facilities in many parts of the North. We can build them, we can spend lots of money, it's easy to go and cut a ribbon, but to run these places and really make them effective is where we seem to have our problems.

I guess if we are looking for the alternatives, it's in the start and seemingly mushrooming response to organizations like Crack Busters here in Yellowknife, an initiative between community partners, including the Tree of Peace and the Salvation Army. This is something that I think really should be leading us to where we want to go. These are programs that started, if you will, at the street level with direct contact with the people involved, and the response to their initiatives seems to be remarkable. So this is where I really fundamentally believe the answers lie, at the community and the street level, and what can we do to initiate programs that will take hold in those environments, beyond what we might be able to do with creating new facilities.

Mr. Speaker, at the very least we should be acknowledging that our ability to cope has not kept pace with the very rapid transition in the economy up here. I think when we look back a decade or so and we saw the first indication that yes, there will be diamond mines, yes, they will have an enormous impact on our economy, I don't think we could have anticipated the enormity of the social consequence of what that new wealth is bringing us; of what the wealth in the neighbouring province of Alberta, for instance, that has been a super-heated economy as well, and it's no secret when that kind of thing happens, you are going to get these kinds of impacts.

Perhaps one thing that we should be considering is joining up with our counterparts in Alberta. It seems that we understand that the highway is one of the main supply routes for drugs. What can we do with the hundreds of kilometres in northern Alberta that is part of this traffic as well? Maybe there is part of our answer, as well.

Mr. Speaker, if there is one final thing that I have come to understand in my experience here with the Social Programs committee and talking to professionals and experts, it is that the range and the complexity of addictions is extraordinary. Alcoholism in itself is very diverse, the consequences can be extraordinarily diverse, but now with so much different chemical and drug material going around, the addictions are not simply a one-stop-shop kind of thing.

We probably in the North will always be challenged, extremely challenged, in being able to provide rehabilitation and detox services on a regional basis, on a youth or an age basis, as the motion suggests. These are all extraordinarily expensive and hard-to-design and hard-to-maintain programs. But the spirit of the motion is that we have got to realize that we haven't kept up with the consequences and with the realities that are out there. We need to speed up our efforts to deliver programs that really are going to help, especially as my colleague, Mr. Ramsay, pointed out, when somebody is asking for help and we cannot put anything at their disposal. That is

probably where we are failing most dramatically, is when people want help and we are not able to give it. That is where we should start. Thanks, Mr. Speaker.