Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will try to be brief but this is a very important matter, a very important motion and I feel I do need to speak to it. Like other Members, first of all, I would like to thank Minister Bell for his foresight and his call to arms, so to speak, to deal with this whole issue of drug dealers and bootleggers in the Northwest Territories. As other Members have said, as well, we are being ravaged by this and in some ways I think we're afraid to stand up to them. We have grown complacent. We talked about that when we talked about the denormalization of alcohol abuse and substance abuse. We have grown complacent. We have learned to co-exist with it. It has become a part of the fabric of our communities to understand that there will be drug dealers and there will be bootleggers. If we are going to make progress, we need to stand up to this, but we need to find the best way to do that.
I respect the work of the Social Programs committee. They are the ones who went out and went on the road and consulted and have spent a great deal of time and work on this particular piece of legislation and I do thank them for that. I'm going to tell you, I think in my community there is a lot of support for legislation like safer communities legislation, but we work in a consensus government here; we do not try to railroad each other. I have been involved in votes that were passed by one vote before and I tell you, at the end of the day, when you win at a vote by one vote, it really, in our consensus style government, doesn't leave a very good taste. If I can give you an example. I remember one day driving back here in a snowstorm to get into the House, barely, to run in and support and just be pressured and lobbied about this motion not to give Yellowknife an extra MLA. I have to tell you, many times since then I've regretted that because that spawned that whole Friends of Democracy court action, and that was one vote. That was my vote. I was on my way from Hay River and I was late and I got here and the Premier of the day, I won't tell you who it was, but anyway...
---Laughter
You know, there was a big pressure and it was all riding on me. I have to tell you...I'm telling you it is not in keeping with the sense and the style of consensus government to ram something through on one vote. So we could possibly have pushed this through, but you know the thing is that it would go to the next Assembly and it would need a lot of modification and a lot of support. It's kind of six of one, half-dozen of the other. We can either take the time now and as Members have committed, and I'll tell you, if I'm back in this government in the next Assembly, I am going to save the Hansard of this discussion here for the day that Members committed to the principle of this particular legislation. I will remember then, too, that it was Mr. Bell who has the foresight to make sure his department got this on the road and we will not forget about it.
Out of respect for other Members, we need to consider a made-in-the-North solution. I could not agree with Member McLeod more. We need a made-in-the-North solution. We are not like other jurisdictions. We need to give our communities the tools to deal with these problems; maybe a different model. Cookie cutter legislation doesn't always work in the North. Our communities are very diverse. We've got Colville Lake and a place like Yellowknife. How do you enact legislation that can address the needs of both of those communities? Maybe we need to do a pilot project. Maybe we need to do a prototype. Maybe we need to roll this out in one community or maybe a large community, a small community, and see how it works.
When we did the WCB legislation, because of the complexity of it, we approached it in a workshop kind of environment. We didn't just do it on our routine kind of process that we move legislation along on, because we understood that we wanted to get it right and we wanted to have that dialogue and we wanted to think it out amongst ourselves in collaboration also with the stakeholders.
So I think that it's just very unfortunate timing. This government is drawing to a close; we have run out of time. We could sit here for the next 10 hours and debate these amendments and everything. I don't think that, at the end of the day, we are still going to do justice to a piece of legislation as important as this.
Like I said, the Social Programs committee say they have heard the cries of the communities. We all have, and we need, to respect that and we need to listen to that.
I just want to say one other thing that might be slightly off the topic of the motion here, but we need to think a little bit broader and a little more outside the box. We have been taking about drugs and alcohol in our communities. We can clean up the drugs and the alcohol, but there is a reason why people are enslaved to these things. As a government, and I have said it before and I will say it again, we pay very little attention to the spiritual conditions that give people that meaning of life, that purpose of living. There is no reason...You want to talk about a made-in-the-North solution, why can't we pay attention to that? Why can't we recognize that having a healthy spirit is part of the whole person and a well person? Why can't we do that? We stay away from it; we avoid it; we say that's somebody else's business and we don't want to get involved in that, but our people are dying. Our people are getting caught in things that they cannot get themselves out of and we are trying, as a government, to deal with it.
I will support the motion here today and again thanks so much to the Minister of the Department of Justice for the work he's done on this. It will be back. Thank you.