Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Health and Social Services.

1. Please provide a list of programs and services that are offered to disabled persons in communities and larger centers and by which government department.
2. Within the health authorities of the Northwest Territories, what types of programs and services are coordinated by the authorities?
3. Where do all the disabled funding services come from to serve the disabled people in the North; federal, territorial or non-government agencies?
4. What NGO agencies are delivering programs or services in small communities?
5. Can the Minister provide a list of the various categories or disabilities in the Sahtu and the number of Sahtu people who are classified under them?

1. My question is for the Minister of Transportation.1. Please provide the latest updated discussion with the federal Minister regarding future funding for an all-weather road in the Sahtu.
2. In the absence of federal funding, would the Minster consider a pilot project in the Sahtu for next year, using the community construction approach?
3. What are the department plans to improve the highway roads in the Sahtu, which would show an improvement from their present conditions?

Thank you. Item 7, written questions. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Braden.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Justice.

Please provide data available regarding trends in drug-related offences, court appearances, jail terms, Legal Aid files and social services intervention, such as child apprehensions. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Item 7, written questions. Item 8, returns to written questions. Mr. Clerk.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk. Item 8, returns to written questions. Item 9, replies to opening address. Item 10, petitions. Item 11, reports of standing and special committees. Item 12, reports of committees on the review of bills. Item 13, tabling of documents. The honourable Minister of RWED, Mr. Bell.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled Opportunities for Prosperity, Community Futures Program 2003-04 Annual Report. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Bell. Item 13, tabling of documents. Item 14, notices of motion. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I give notice that on Monday, November 1, 2004, I will move the following motion:

Now therefore I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, that the government establish a centre in the NWT dedicated to treating addictions to drugs other than alcohol;

And further that the government establish an addictions treatment centre specifically for youth;

And furthermore that the government reopen residential treatment centres in Yellowknife and Inuvik.

Mr. Speaker, at the appropriate time, I will seek unanimous consent to deal with this motion today.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Item 14, notices of motion. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I give notice that on Monday, November 1, 2004, I will move the following motion:

I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Great Slave, that notwithstanding Rule 4, that when this House adjourns on Friday, October 29, 2004, it shall be adjourned until Wednesday, February 9, 2005;

And further, that any time prior to February 9, 2005, if the Speaker is satisfied, after consultation with the Executive Council and Members of the Legislative Assembly, that the public interest requires that the House should meet at an earlier time during the adjournment, the Speaker may give notice and thereupon the House shall meet at the time stated in such notice and shall transact its business as it has been duly adjourned to that time.

Mr. Speaker, at the appropriate time, I will seek unanimous consent to deal with this motion today.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Item 14, notices of motion. Item 15, notices of motion for first reading of bills.

At this time, Members, the Chair shall call a short break before we go onto the next item on the order paper.

---SHORT RECESS

I will call the House back to order. Orders of the day, item 16, motions. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I seek unanimous consent to deal with the treatment centre motion I gave notice of earlier today.

the Member is seeking unanimous consent to deal with the motion he gave notice of earlier today. Are there any nays? There are no nays. Please proceed with your motion, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

WHEREAS addictions to drugs and alcohol continue to devastate many Northwest Territories individuals and families;

AND WHEREAS the use of crack cocaine, heroin and other drugs has increased substantially in Northwest Territories communities in recent years;

AND WHEREAS the numbers of youth addicted to alcohol and drugs is increasing;

AND WHEREAS having the support of family and friends makes the difference between success and failure for many people struggling to overcome addictions;

AND WHEREAS many individuals are forced to seek treatment in southern facilities away from their support networks due to the lack of treatment centres in the Northwest Territories;

AND WHEREAS the residential treatment programs in Inuvik and Yellowknife were discontinued in 1997 and 1999 respectively;

AND WHEREAS the only remaining residential treatment centre in the Northwest Territories is Nats'ejee K'eh on the Hay River Dene Reserve;

NOW THEREFORE I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, that the government establish a centre in the NWT dedicated to treating addictions to drugs other than alcohol;

AND FURTHER that the government establish an addictions treatment centre specifically for youth;

AND FURTHERMORE the government re-open residential treatment centres in Yellowknife and Inuvik. Thank you.

---Applause

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. A motion is on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this motion is one I fully support. It's been an issue I have supported. Earlier today, the Honourable David Krutko made reference to the challenges of our young people and it's something I support 100 percent.

Mr. Speaker, since the time of the cavemen who stomped on the bridge and started howling at the moon, we have, as a society, wrestled with the effects of alcohol in our communities and as a whole.

We, as legislators and leaders, need to be educated on the devastating effects of alcohol abuse and the costs we pay either as a government, communities, families or personally with regard to the effects of alcohol and drugs.

Mr. Speaker, we are dealing with drugs such as crack cocaine, heroine and other drugs that are on the market in the communities. I would like to take a proactive approach in establishing a foundation where people can go to get their lives straightened out and be the person they are meant to be.

Mr. Speaker, it's hard to see our young people deal with troubling times who deal with alcohol and that's the best method they know in coping with life. Can we provide them with something better, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Speaker, we need to support our families who are dealing with addictions such as drugs and alcohol. There are major dollars spent in the Northwest Territories in sending clients down to treatment centres. I guess I question the government in terms of why they closed down these treatment centres in light of the potential of resource development happening in the Northwest Territories.

Now we are told that Nats'ejee K'eh will be reprofiled and readjusted to fit the current issues in the North. I wait to see that report.

Mr. Speaker, getting a drug centre with specific programs and services that only deals with drugs will help because one day our youth will be sitting in our chairs where we are sitting. It's something we have to do for our youth today and this is the reason why I support this motion, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

---Applause

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. To the motion. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I, too, support the motion that's before us today. I can't speak about the drug situation and the need for addiction treatment in Inuvik, but certainly I am supportive of that happening and I know the people of Inuvik would be in support of that happening. I am more in touch with what is happening here in Yellowknife, being a Yellowknife Member.

Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to mention the fact that -- and Mr. Yakeleya referred to it as well -- when you start adding up what it costs to send people south, what it's costing the Government of the Northwest Territories to send the people to the South, the impact it's having on Stanton Territorial Hospital in terms of dealing with those who have addictions at the hospital and it's taking away from valuable resources that should be dedicated to medical-type things, I don't really understand why the treatment centre in Yellowknife closed to begin with in 1999. I understand it had some difficulties in the running of it or there were some underlying issues there, Mr. Speaker, but I am not sure why it happened the way it did.

As a government, we have to understand that there certainly will be a price to putting up a new treatment centre in Yellowknife. But if it doesn't cost us now, it's going to cost us later in terms of cost to corrections, justice, health care. If you start tallying up those costs, Mr. Speaker, the cost of getting a dedicated treatment facility here certainly will outweigh that.

I also don't understand why it is -- and the Minister has spoken to it before -- about putting money into bricks and mortar. We have a facility on the Detah road, the Somba K'e Lodge, and I don't understand why we can't use that as a treatment facility. That is something I just can't understand.

This is in reference to this motion and it goes back to addictions, but last week when I started talking about addictions, I was out in the community at a restaurant. A young fellow about the age of 16 was working behind the counter and he said, Mr. Ramsay, you are saying some good things in the Legislative Assembly. I want you to keep that up. He said my parents have been married for 19 years and they are breaking up right now because my father is addicted to cocaine. That really stuck with me, Mr. Speaker. The young fellow said there isn't really anything here for my father. This is a run-of-the-mill, middle-class family living in Yellowknife. The impact that they are feeling as a result of an addiction to cocaine is really something that stuck with me then and will stay with me, Mr. Speaker.

Dealing with other constituents that are addicted to crack cocaine, there is really no place for them to turn here in Yellowknife. Having to go south, you have to be close to the support network, your friends, your family, to try to give you that encouragement to seek help and to get help.

I don't know if other Members are aware of this, but right now in Yellowknife, there are more meetings for Narcotics Anonymous, Crack Busters, there are meetings seven nights a week to deal with just drug addictions. There are more meetings to deal with drug addictions than there are for alcohol. It never used to be the case, Mr. Speaker. Drugs are becoming much more prevalent in the city of Yellowknife. With the economic activity that's happening north of the city, the proposed pipeline, there is going to be more disposable income here in the Northwest Territories and I really do support this motion.

I think it's high time that the government look at re-establishing treatment centres. We can't use band-aid solutions any longer, Mr. Speaker. We have to get some

dedicated facilities to deal with what's out there today and what's going to be out there tomorrow. There are many folks out there who are suffering and who are falling through the cracks.

I am in full support of this motion, Mr. Speaker, as I am sure the rest of my colleagues will be as well. Thank you.

---Applause

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. To the motion. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Braden.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. To the motion. The honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.