Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to direct my questions today to the Minister of Health and Social Services, the Honourable Tom Beaulieu. I want to follow up a little bit on some of my colleagues here who touched on the issue of alcoholism in the Northwest Territories and treatment for that condition.
We cannot deny that we have a disproportionate number of our people who are involved with an addiction to alcohol. We cannot deny that fact. It is a fact. It is a disproportionate number. We get somehow lulled into thinking that this is normal. This is not normal. If we had a health outbreak of some kind that came and attacked our people here in the North, we would be on the national news. It would be a national crisis. We would be doing everything to find a vaccine to address it. Because this situation has existed for a long time, I believe we have become complacent as a government.
Alcohol addiction is robbing our people of their health, their livelihood, their prosperity, their peace. Peace in their lives. We as a government need to acknowledge the problem and take a more aggressive approach to address it. I was pleased to read… Oh, first of all let me say that there are many, many paths to sobriety and we need to explore all those options. To simply name a few, there’s the residential treatment program, there’s the Alcoholics Anonymous, there’s counselling, there’s spiritual healing. You’ve heard of people who have been miraculously delivered from alcohol addiction, so people should keep praying.
I read of an interesting scenario in the Slave River Journal, where the Fort Smith Health Authority has an out-patient program where people can come in for an hour and a half or two hours a day and receive support and counselling. I’d like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services if he could elaborate on that program for us, where it came from, who is sponsoring it and how we can get that into other communities.
Almost four. Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have the details of the Fort Smith program. I wasn’t aware that there was a program in Fort Smith. I heard about it for the first time today.
I don’t have a lot of details about it either. I read about it in the newspaper. It sounded interesting because it isn’t everybody that can leave house, home, family, jobs, whatever commitments that they have, it isn’t everybody that can leave all that and go to a 28-day residential program. It’s at the community level where they can be an out-patient. They’re not in the hospital. They go to this program through the health authority and it seems to make imminent sense to me as one alternative for people to access help. It’s also for people who are sober but want to maintain that sobriety; they can also access this program. I will get the article from the Slave River Journal, I will share it with the Minister and then I will pursue questions on this later after we’ve both had a chance to inform ourselves a little bit more about it on how we can see that on a broader scale in the Northwest Territories.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
