Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I will be supporting committee's motion in this area. I have my reasons for supporting it: it is to be able to have a safe supply of cannabis to all residents of the Northwest Territories, not to only some residents of the Northwest Territories. I can assure Cabinet that, if this motion is not passed, you will be supporting the illegal trade of marijuana in small communities. There is no reason in the world, there's no reason in the world for an individual to fly all the way to a liquor store to be able to buy, and they can't even pick up marijuana for their friends, because of the limit that is there. So everybody has to fly in to a community to get their own. What is going to be the option? The option is going to be to either buy it online or buy illegally. So for the people who don't have Visas out there, and I've talked many times, when you have 40 per cent employment rates, you don't have many Visas flying around in the community, Mr. Chair, and if they were to get a Visa, if they were to be lucky enough to have a job and get a Visa and want to smoke legal marijuana, they will buy it from somewhere else. They'll order it places where they're not selling it for $10 a gram, because that's what the market, that's what the government sets the price at, and everybody else is going to set the price at the market rate. The illegal drug dealers are going to have a better sense of what the market is than the government.
We have to let the people start up vendors in the communities so they could stay within the market and they could provide legal pot to people, safe pot to people. There's a feeling that there are going to be stores, pot stores popping up all over the community. That ain't gonna happen. There's not enough business for that. Not going to happen. And if it does, at least they'll be paying taxes back to the government coffers instead of putting illegal money in their pocket.
If we approve what the government is saying, we are supporting the illegal trade of pot. There's no question about it. I think everybody knows that, but for some reason or another people are bound to the fact that they think that there's going to be pot stores popping up all over, and everybody's going to start smoking marijuana. That's not necessarily going to happen. That ain't gonna happen. There's a reason that it's being restricted to only certain communities; there's a reason that it's only going in to liquor stores. If it's not what the honourable colleague from Yellowknife North said, that the government wants to keep all of the tax dollars for themselves, then it must be what? I just can't understand, unless the other reason is a lack of understanding of what the lay of the land is as far as this product goes in the Northwest Territories. It is unbelievable. It ain't gonna happen. It we don't pass this committee, then we are supporting the illegal trade of marijuana. In the whole North, you will hear that, and that's how it's going to be set up. Everybody's going to know that this government is passing a bill that supports the illegal trade of marijuana by restricting it to only certain communities and leaving the small communities, the 27 other communities that we went out and heard from, that said that this is what we want to see. Mr. Chairman, I request a recorded vote. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.