Thank you, Madam Chair. I’d like to thank the Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya, for all his hard work in bringing this bill to our committee and to the Assembly here, and I definitely appreciate the situation that’s in the Sahtu

right now and, obviously, befitting that we had a whole question period on drug and alcohol problems throughout the North. I understand the issue before us.

I’d also like to thank the members of the Gov Ops who have taken this to the public in the area of the Sahtu and got the general information from those people and their concerns.

I guess I do have some issues with this bill on several levels. The first area that I have a concern with is I’m not really supportive of restrictions and their effectiveness in curbing alcoholism and drinking problems in communities. I believe in areas where they’ve had it in the past or currently there are still drinking problems and there are people carrying on and continue to have issues out there, and I understand this does not necessarily mean that there’s going to be a restriction placed in the Sahtu. It just gives them the potential to have that. But yet, they’re giving control, and if it ever happened, restrictions would be in place. I’m not a strong believer that those restrictions would be effective.

The other area of concern, obviously, coming from a regional centre, is that outside communities have control on activities that happen in a regional centre, and if we flipped the coin and regional centres wanted something controlled in a small community, we would probably be called bullies and it would be seen as an issue that the larger centre…David and Goliath type of concept. It begs the question and the precedent that if this is allowed to happen, that, you know, now we’re dealing with liquor, but it may be other issues within this government where the communities surrounding the regional centres say we want to be able to control what happens in the regional centres. Whether that has to do with Education, whether that has to do with Health, whether it has to do with any department in the GNWT, I feel that we’re setting a precedent in allowing this to happen.

We’ve discussed, and I know the Members have talked about sales going up, and I know we couldn’t prove why that was happening. Whether that was due to the fact that industry had come into the community, like some Members had talked about. The ability for someone that used to go to Yellowknife on a vacation and buy a case of whiskey for their own personal consumption now doesn’t have to do that. They can go to Norman Wells and do that.

The other concern that I have, and when we’re talking about prohibition, restrictions and that type of stuff, it’s been done in many areas before in history. It’s been going on for years, for decades, with very little positive results. I think by putting restrictions in place probably increases some of the criminal activity. I think it promotes bootlegging. If I live in a community where there are restrictions in

place and four of my friends want to sit around and have a case of beer, we are done the case of beer and we want to drink some more, we are restricted in what we can consume, so we would just go to a bootlegger and get that. It promotes that type of activity, I do believe.

Respectfully, to the people of the Sahtu and to the Member, I just feel that we, as a government, definitely need to support drug and alcohol issues in the Sahtu and other regions, but I don’t think this bill is an effective way of curbing the problem.