Mr. Chair, certainly I encourage the Minister to continue providing other effective means of educating the young people.
If you look at the RCMP stats in the Sahtu, the increase of liquor has shot up quite considerably. It’s scary. If you look at the amount of liquor that is being sold in the Northwest Territories combined that with the stats of the RCMP with people who are getting into trouble because of alcohol, those numbers are high. If you look at even the jail, $37 million to house correctional facility inmates in our jail here, and the amount that the Northwest Territories liquor sales have caused a lot of headaches for a lot of people.
I agree with the Minister when it comes down to it, it is a personal choice and personal responsibility. Sometimes with the alcohol, it adds some other chemicals in there that really fights the person and the heart and gets them addicted. That has happened to the best of us.
I want to work with the Minister within the life of this government to have some other options. How do we educate the people? More and more young people are using alcohol. If they can use it in a responsible manner, great, but I believe that education is the key for handling this issue here.
I want to ask the Minister if this education promotion is done by the NWT Liquor Commission, is it going to reconsider how we promote, other than labels on the bottles and bags and posters and ads. Is there something else that we could look at that would see that we have something to measure? Do you have a measurement of results? Maybe we can look at some of the numbers that we are having here, certainly the Norman Wells liquor store due to the unrestricted sales that certainly shot up from previous years. This is what I want to look at.
I heard him once say, on one hand we buy the liquor and on the other hand we do the treatment. We do both. I am looking to see how we can help our people. I believe in our goals for healthy, independent, strong people. This is one issue here with our hand in the bottle that is also killing a lot of our people. It’s a tough commission, I guess, and how do we do that? Where is the balance? Thank you.