Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As Members know, in June the Minister of Health and Social Services tabled the department’s Mental Health and Addictions Action Plan. With the mention of enhancing addictions treatment programs an element in the priorities of the 17th Assembly, it’s good to have the Mental Health and Addictions Action Plan lining up with those priorities. But today I must follow up on the subject of the questions I asked the Minister last week about the Minister’s Forum on Addictions.
Don’t get me wrong; I am not one to suggest that consultation is a bad thing. It is a good thing. But there can be too much of a good thing. That’s where we are now with this forum: doing consultation on top of all of our previous consultations on addictions. I like the forum concept, but for the long haul not for the short term. I like it as a sounding board for the department and the Minister, used to gauge how well mental health programs are working. Consultation is not needed right now.
I’ve read the department’s action plan. It lays out where we need to go, what we need to do, and it fully identifies the gaps that currently exist in our mental health and addictions programs and services. We should be tackling those gaps right now, revamping and reorganizing our current programs to address those gaps, one at a time if we have to, but we have to take action.
The Minister’s forum will only study again, study some more, study a problem we are too familiar with. If we as Members of this Assembly and if the Minister of Health and Social Services is serious about solving the mental health and addictions problems in our territory, serious about getting our people well, we would devote funding right now to Health and Social Services to get the job done. There must be a commitment to allocate those dollars, not only from the Department of Health and Social Services but from all of Cabinet.
We must have a social safety net for our residents to land in when they fall off the tightrope of life. We don’t have that safety net, those supports right now. Just look at the gaps in services outlined in the Mental Health and Addictions Action Plan. If we, as a government, are ever to help our people move forward, move up, move on, if we’re ever to see them start to succeed, to become contributing, effective members of our NWT society, we have to stop studying the addictions problem and start taking action.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The Member for Deh Cho, Mr. Nadli.
