Thank you, Mr. Chair. I too would like to echo the comments of my colleagues. In my community, my region, we've been experiencing a lot of drug activity. It's overtaken the place of the marijuana trade. There's more people that we don't even know that are in our communities. They're taking advantage of the vulnerable people and taking over their houses. For instance, we have a paraplegic young guy in our community and he's staying in a housing unit, and some of these guys come from Edmonton or down south and they know this guy already because everybody knows him from down south, I guess, and that's where they set up shop. And there's times that this individual, he's scared to go to the authorities. So the only place he can go is his grandmother's house and just try to get some sleep, and he leaves those guys at his unit. And there's a lot of people scared to intervene. The RCMP, the community's losing confidence in the RCMP because the RCMP are feeling exhausted because they feel that they're taking on all this responsibilities. It was manageable before all these hard drugs came in, but now it's unmanageable. They don't have the resources to do it. They're taking on the roles of family counselling and all these other roles. Because when an individual is addicted to these hard drugs, it doesn't affect only that person. It affects the family. It affects the community. And it also takes a toll on the resource people within the community, the RCMP, the health centre. Every department in the government is affected by one person's use.
When we went on our social development tour in Aklavik and Inuvik, we had a meeting with the RCMP and the sergeant there stated that, you know, the only way that we can combat this drug -- the drug trade in the NWT is to get these people that are addicted, get them some help so the dealers don't have any customers. And I've always stated that it's just not the individual that needs to get these counselling services, it has to be the whole family. Like if you send one person -- if you send the individual out, then he goes out for extended period of time and he comes back and his family wouldn't know how to deal with him. So if we're going to take this approach of trying to heal our people, we have to look at healing the whole family right down to the children.
The RCMP in Inuvik stated that if they had a drug task force that dealt with drugs only, but it's a big trade. It's all over. And I don't know if just one drug task force can take on this responsibility. It would be a 24/7 job there. But he said if that force was initiated, then maybe that the other RCMPs can concentrate on other -- their other responsibilities of protecting the communities.
Just before Christmas in my hometown of Fort McPherson, we had five deaths in less than two weeks. I know there was -- and I believe four of them was drug related, and one was unknown. It wasn't revealed. But I remember sitting with the chief at the time and the next thing she got a phone call, so she had to go out on the porch to take it. She called me and said we have to go -- we have to go inform another person and while we're just dealing with one, the community was gathered at the community hall because we just lost a young person. Then we had to go to another family and tell them that, you know, they found their son dead, overdosed. So that got pretty hard on the leaders. It affects everybody. It affects the family. It affects the individual, the community. And the support is there, but it does have an impact. And I like what's going on within this budget but I look at the gun and gang strategy, it's no longer in existence. I don't know what we can do as a government to combat this awful disease that everybody is enduring.
We have really intelligent young people within -- I have to speak for my community alone. I know there's a lot of young educated individuals within the community. This drug does not discriminate against anybody. These young individuals, they're really educated. They were going to colleges and some of them come back, and they're -- they have nothing. They have to give their children to their parents because they're hooked on this drug. And today's -- I know some of them are related, directly related to me. My sister's kids. Not all of them, but I don't even know where some of them are. They could be in the community at one day, then the next day they're gone. But I hope we can look at some -- find some alternative measures where we can meet these goals of combatting drug use, gangs, and just take the pressure off the RCMP and other resource people. And I believe this government can do it. That's all I have to say. Thank you.