Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to say that when I visit my communities, and I also heard from many people in the North, they are saying that the alcohol abuse issue in all of our communities is getting worse, and the drug issue amongst our youth is getting worse. It’s actually getting out of hand, as some of the people have said. It’s no longer a Friday or Saturday event. It’s a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday event. Now people are saying it’s getting worse and out of hand because there are younger and younger people in our communities that are using.
Bootleggers are selling to the younger people, older people, and they see an opportunity. People are telling me, you guys are in government and you should do something with alcohol abuse.
There is a cloud of darkness coming in this great land we call the Northwest Territories, the land of resources and wealth, that we can no longer ignore. It’s only going to get worse if we do not put a stop to it.
The younger population are our leaders. There are some good young leaders that will step forward and say enough is enough. If you look in our communities, if you look at the conditions of our communities, some of us spoke this afternoon about it, it doesn’t look very good.
This motion is to support something for the young people and for our communities. It talks about an opportunity, about saving lives, about putting on our best, most sacred powerful place in the world, on our land. Taking them out there. It’s about investing some dollars.
Now we are just about finished this Assembly. Given that we’re going into a new Assembly and everything’s going to be new in the 17th , we don’t
even know if they will take this discussion or whatever, if it will carry forward. Hopefully this government can give us a progress report on this motion, even though it’s only a recommendation to government, that they can say yes, it makes sense to go on the land, to take families out on the land. Yellowknife, Inuvik, Tulita, Colville, Sachs, wherever. Say we believe in you. The families that hurt together are the families that have to heal together.
We do have the Nats’ejee K’eh Treatment Centre in Hay River. It’s doing its work but we need to do something different to see the success of our people. Like I said, hopefully with this motion it will give some hope to the families.
We also heard it on CBC this morning. Here in Yellowknife people are drinking things that I thought were not possible. Unbelievable. Even in the city of Yellowknife people are using things that I just have
a hard time thinking about. I guess that’s how powerful the addiction is. It’s true when they say alcohol is one of the most cunning, baffling, and powerful.
There are a lot of people out there willing to help. They may not have the qualifications or criteria recognized by some of the western academic world, but they certainly have the qualifications in the Aboriginal world. I think we have to bring the two together to save us. We have to use both strengths to save a life. I think the best way is to put the people on the land.
Like I said, there is a dark cloud coming. If we don’t do anything about it today, we have only ourselves to blame. We as a government need to be there for the people. We need to do something and look at some options to put people in our hands to say we’re going to help you. We’ll look at on-the-land treatment programs, a mobile one. I’ve seen it work. There are no guarantees that it will be all successful, but I think we have something there for them.
I want to thank the Member for Yellowknife Centre for seconding the motion. I thank my colleagues for allowing this motion to come this far to the House to speak on. I look forward to hearing some of the comments. I’ll conclude later on.