Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am going to speak on something that has always been near and dear to my heart and that is the mental health and addictions. I know we have been almost beating this to death, I guess you could say, and we do that for a reason, because we want to protect the people of the NWT.
It was great to have the Minister of Justice table in the House yesterday the 2012 coroner’s report. It just so happened that it happened at the same time I decided to do my Member’s statement. However, what I did last night and this morning was I reviewed that report. I just want to share some stats with Members and people of the Northwest Territories today.
In 2012 there was a total of 99 deaths in the NWT, 19 which were accidental, eight were suicide, five homicides, five that were classified as undetermined or unclassified at all, and 62 were natural deaths.
I would like to speak to the suicide portion of that. Unfortunately, of the eight suicides, five had confirmed the presence of alcohol. I look at these stats in 2011 and 2010 as well. In both years, of the seven suicides in each year, four of them also confirmed presence of alcohol. Suicide is very big to me because in 2012 six of these eight suicides happened in the Inuvik region. That needs to be addressed.
Before I go on, I will talk a little bit about the accidental deaths, which were also very alarming. Of the 19 accidental deaths, 12 were alcohol or drug related. All the cold exposure of motor vehicle accidents and any blunt head trauma incidents all involved alcohol.
This goes to show that all the work that we’ve been doing over the past two years that we’ve been in session here, plus all the work and all the questions Members have on this side of the House do need to be addressed and do need to be answered too. We do need to revise the Mental Health Act. In fact, the last time the Mental Health Act had any significant amendments was actually assented in 1985 and there hasn’t been any significant amendments since then. We do need detox beds or detox centres and not beds, and more seriously, we do need treatment centres to combat these issues. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
