Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Minister's response to some of these issues. They are definitely very, very general comments, but just to flag them and remind the Minister and his officials of some of them.
Just one of the other things that I want to say in closing is I would encourage the Minister, when it comes to stating the obvious at some times, I think as elected leaders we are reluctant to state the obvious because we don't want to offend people and people have taken up certain lifestyles and certain habits. Without being unkind or uncharitable or not to be judgemental, but sometimes we need to state the facts for the way they are in some instances.
When I was Minister, I was in a community at one point and they were talking about the quality of their water source in the lake from which they got their drinking water. They were also talking about the high incidents of diabetes in their community. In the meeting I sat in, without a word of a lie, some people drank three or four cans of Coca Cola while I was sitting there. Sometimes I think we are very reluctant to state the obvious. We dance around things in the name of being politically correct. When you see how things like alcohol and drugs and things like this are affecting our people here in the North, I think it's going to take somebody, maybe all of us, to call it like it is and to speak directly. I know it sounds like I am contradicting what I said before because I don't think we should be negative, but at the same time we could be pragmatic. We need to identify the real problems because I think it will go some ways to address them as well. Sometimes people do have an unrealistic expectation that somebody else is going to magically solve all the problems. So when it comes to the issue of taking personal responsibility, that's a message that has to continue to go out there. I know it's a message this Minister has put out there and sometimes just in what we listen to, we still get the impression that we have created some kind of enormous dependence on the government and the government is going to fix everything that ails us. In fact, that could never happen.
So how we engage people and get them involved in caring about their own well-being is a challenging thing, but it's definitely a theme we need to continue to work on. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.