Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have stood up in this House many times to talk about drug dealers and the bootleggers in the communities and what this government is doing to curb the activity and the harm that they do to our residents of the Northwest Territories.

I want to take it one step further today and I want to talk about what this government is doing in terms of creating a proceeds of crime legislation, such as a Civil Forfeitures Act, like the provinces of BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec. What this act would do is freeze, take possession of

or forfeit any property that’s used in these illegal activities. We can freeze buildings, businesses where some of these activities are taking place, take over skidoos, boats, vehicles that are used in transportation of drugs or alcohol.

I would like to, at this time, also commend what the RCMP and the people of the Sahtu are doing in terms of all these drug busts and also with the seizure of all the bootlegging and all the alcohol.

Mr. Speaker, I want to share some statistics with you in terms of what’s happening in some of the other jurisdictions. I found a nice report here. In Ontario, from November 2003 to July 2007, in 170 cases $3.6 million in property was forfeited, $11.5 million in property frozen, $1 million distributed to victims and more than $900,000 awarded in grants to help prevent victimization.

The assets that would be forfeited could go to compensating these victims, compensating businesses, compensating the community. It could go into grants such as for community programs. It could go to students who are trying to go to school. It can be given out as donations.

Like I said, I have stood up in this House many times and talked about the bootleggers, drug dealers and the harm that they do to our communities. I want to see this government take that one step further and look at creating legislation so that the bootleggers and drug dealers who continue to do these types of crimes, we can start taking their assets so that they don’t have that opportunity to transport alcohol to the communities or transport drugs to the communities. I want to know what this government is doing to disable these types of things that are going on in the communities. Thank you.