Thank you. Page 5-26, Finance, activity summary, office of the comptroller general, grants and contributions, contributions, $11.085 million. Does committee agree?

Thank you. Page 5-27, Finance, information item, office of the comptroller general, active positions. Are there any questions?

Thank you. Page 5-29, Finance, activity summary, office of the chief information officer, operations expenditure summary, $2.469 million.

Thank you. Page 5-30, Finance, information item, office of the chief information officer, grants and contributions, contributions, $100,000. Does committee agree?

Thank you. Page 5-31, Finance, information item, office of the chief information officer, active positions. Any questions?

Thank you. Page 5-33, Finance, information item, Liquor Revolving Fund. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a couple of questions here in regard to the Liquor Revolving Fund. Can the Minister indicate to me from 2011-12 what was the number of sales in the Norman Wells liquor store?

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Just give them a second to look for that information. We’ll go to Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We don’t have that level of detail in terms of community consumption of alcohol, but we can commit to get that information for committee. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I look forward to the information from the Minister. In 2011-12 the Territorial Liquor Commission had sales about $46.3 million. Gross sales increased over the previous year by 1.6 percent. In regard to the Liquor Commission, there are goals and objectives. One of them is to educate people on responsible alcohol use and not abusing it. Can the Minister briefly tell me what type of promotional programs they have out there to support their goals and initiatives under this Liquor Commission?

Mr. Chair, firstly, we work with the Government of the Northwest Territories where we have a huge interest in alcohol education, through Health, through Active Living, through all of those other programs. As a commission, we label all of the bottles. We have the bags that are marked. We do posters. We do ads about responsible drinking, as

well, as I indicated, to try to make sure that what we are doing is supportive and ties into the work that has been done by government departments such as Health and Social Services and Education. Trying to really push, for example, not having pregnant mothers drink is one really key area. We make efforts in all of those areas to try to educate people to make the right choices. Thank you.

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.

Mr. Chair, the Member and I have had numerous discussions about the ravages of alcohol and its destructive force across the entire fabric of the Northwest

Territories and how he and I, growing old together, still talk about how do we bend the curve on this in a positive way.

I can make the commitment that we will work with, of course, the social program Minister, Social Programs members’ committee, the Liquor Commission, when it comes to the issue of alcohol and education and what we can or should be doing that we’re not now doing, that we would, of course, do our part as part of that process. If there are things out there that we haven’t thought of, there are innovative approaches being done in other jurisdictions, we as a government of course want to look at those because this is one of the single…this is, in my mind, the biggest social problem that we do have in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.

Thank you. I’m going to have to disagree with the Minister there. I’m not growing old. We have matured together. We have worked together on this issue, and we’ve had discussions. This is one of the most complex and serious issues that we’ve talked about. I’m really encouraged by the Minister to say that there’s a possibility of looking at some things like how do we work together.

Liquor is provided in the Northwest Territories. That’s one of the things that we do as a government or any government across Canada. On the other hand, it has such a destructive force that I keep bringing it up to the Minister, and we’ll continue to talk until we get really old, old together, and see how we deal with this issue.

I know the government is working hard on it through other initiatives, and I really want to have some good discussion on this issue here. If we can solve and resolve this issue, look out world: the Northwest Territories is going to take off because we’ve got some really good people that just happen to have this demon, as some people call it, hanging on to them, and that’s pretty bad.

So I’m going to leave it at that. I look forward to working with the Minister on this. And again, how do we start promoting other promotional campaign ads that tell the people if you’re going to take this, it can be pretty dangerous? If you do it responsibly and mature, then it’s okay, and that’s what we’ve got to learn.

So I’m going to leave it at that. That’s all I have to say, just mostly comments.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Committee, we’re on 5-33, Finance, information item, Liquor Revolving Fund. Any questions.

Thank you. Committee, 5-34, Finance, information item, Liquor Revolving Fund, active positions. Any questions?