Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Reading the Department of Finance and, specifically, the section on the Liquor Commission, there is a corporate culture, a vision, a mission, a mandate, values, et cetera. I want to ask our Minister, in light of this corporate culture and one of the visions is that our customers will have a healthy and responsible attitude towards alcohol consumption, and we’ll provide them with the opportunity to discover, enjoy and share a wide variety of beverage alcohol. Since the lifting of the restrictions at the Norman Wells Liquor Store, the amount of liquor has gone up by 50 percent in the Sahtu region. I want to ask the Minister what provisions within his department that share this vision that our people have a healthy and responsible attitude towards alcohol consumption, what is his department doing to ensure that?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister of Finance, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve been working, as a government and as the Department of Finance, with the Liquor Commission in a number of areas. We try to educate and encourage people, pregnant mothers not to drink, we encourage people to drink responsibly, we encourage people not to drink and drive. We, of course, as a government, work with Health and Social Services. There have been discussions in this House today about Nats’ejee K’eh. We work with the schools. We work with just about all departments of government to try and deal with these particular issues related to addictions and alcohol.
The Northwest Territories Liquor Commission sales in the Sahtu, in Norman Wells was about $2.3 million, up from last year about $220,000 from the previous year, about 10.5 percent. With this campaign program, when you are asking people to have a healthy and responsible attitude towards alcohol, it just flies right over their head.
How is the Minister measuring the effectiveness of this program? How is he getting people to have a healthy and responsible attitude towards the consumption of alcohol? When you look at the alcohol-related crime stats, it certainly doesn’t indicate the effectiveness of this program.
The Member is correct. As a territory, as a government, as individuals and communities, we haven’t managed to come to grips with the ravages of alcohol addictions. The social indicators are all there, incarceration rates, shelters that are full with crimes that are committed that are tied to alcohol, involve alcohol, and the rate of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Spectrum Disorder, they are all there. It’s a crying shame, as the Member says, at this point in our political evolution that we are still having this discussion and the fact that Northerners have an intense proclivity to do things that are bad for them. In this case, alcohol.
We’re going to continue to make those investments. We are going to continue to, hopefully, work with the Members and communities to find out what we do to get people to make the right choices. The Member and I have had this discussion over the years. Sometimes it seems like almost on a daily basis. At the end of the day, government can do so much, but the final decision is going to be the person who decides to pick up the bottle and take the drink. We can’t be there in all those cases. In fact, in all of those cases, we’re not there when that happens. So how do we beat that challenge? That’s a question that still bedevils this Assembly, and I have been standing here now in my 18th year and I worked for 20 years before that, 15 of them in Health and Social Services with the same issues before us. It is a challenge for the North. Thank you.
The Minister is right; that’s the 46 million dollar question. How do we educate our people – with the high crime rates, high incident rates – to drink responsibility and have a healthy attitude towards alcohol? The Minister talked about this, and the Minister of Health is on a mission to look at this issue, hear the people of the Northwest Territories and come up with some creative ideas how to approach this business of alcohol.
Is the Minister working with the Minister of Health to take some of those ideas that possibly could help with the liquor store to educate our people, so in 10 or 20 years we don’t have to have this type of discussion? Can we say yes, we have a solution?
This challenge is a game of inches where we look for success in often, sometimes, very small increments. In this case, the Minister of Health and Social Services has struck a panel, a very blue chip panel, made up of Northerners to provide those recommendations.
Yes, we do work together as a government. We work together as a Cabinet, as an Assembly, to try to make the best decisions possible with the resources we have available. We will look, with great interest, at the recommendations of that panel. The Minister of Health and Social Services will be coming back to us with those recommendations and we will have those discussions. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to ask the Minister of Finance, in light of the amount of work that we have to do regarding alcohol abuse in the Northwest Territories and the revenue that he receives on the sale of liquor in the Northwest Territories, is the Minister looking at increasing that percentage to promote some strong, heartfelt campaigns to look at alcohol from a different perspective in people’s lives?
As a government over the years, going back at least three Assemblies with the State of Emergency report, Stay the Course report, and the work that’s been done on addictions, initially it was linked with mental health, the investments we’ve made in staffing and putting in alcohol and drug workers, addiction workers, mental health workers, community health workers, in review of that process and the debate over facilities, very clearly we are spending a significant amount of money. We are looking at the recommendations of this blue chip panel with great interest, and we will see what they say and then, when that’s done, we will have a collective discussion through the business planning process about how we adjust to go forward to try to achieve greater success in this very critical area. Thank you.
