Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Over the course of this Assembly I have stood up on many occasions to speak to a very serious issue throughout the Northwest Territories. That is dealing in our small communities, specifically in the areas of bootlegging and the drug deals that continue to plague our residents of the Northwest Territories and continue to target our youth and our most vulnerable in our small communities. Obviously, as a result, there are devastating effects not only on our residents but our families, our communities, and the territory as a whole.
When we hear about tragedies, whether they’re accidental, suicides, homicides, crime, violent crime, it all hits everybody very close because we’re a small territory and a small population. When you think about some of these crimes where people are profiting off of some of our most vulnerable in the communities, you only have a handful of liquor stores in the Northwest Territories, yet we still continue to have crime and other issues happening in our small communities. Somehow the liquor is getting in there, the drugs are getting in there and we’ve got to find a way to address this issue a lot sooner than later.
I bring this up only because we continue to see it, we continue to hear about it and we need people in the Northwest Territories to speak up. We need people in the Northwest Territories to empower and support one another to let the RCMP and their leaders know who are doing these acts of crime in the community by bootlegging, selling to our youth, selling to our elders, selling to those who are battling addictions.
We can start by pushing a lot of funding, a lot more work into prevention and promotion, doing the education, creating more awareness within our people to get them understanding how they can take a big step against this issue. I know we’ve done stuff here in the House such as the Victims of Crimes Act, seizing property and those kinds of things. Plus we’ve done a really strong campaign in the Sahtu and here in Yellowknife. We’ve got to get people in the Northwest Territories to understand, and the drug dealers and the bootleggers, that this is not acceptable, it’s not going to happen in the Northwest Territories.
I will have questions for the Minister of Justice later about how he can support our small communities to get the bootleggers and the drug dealers out of the community. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
