Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On Friday I spoke about what’s happening on the streets of Yellowknife and a young woman of 16 who is caught up in drug abuse and risky behaviour. Her mother is struggling to find help for her, with only frustration and anxiety to show for it. The lesson her mother is learning is that she can count on no one for help. Not school officials, not Social Services and not the police. As she says, this has been a nightmare and it just keeps getting worse.
I’m going to use her words to tell you this story, Mr. Speaker. “The RCMP were called to the mall because three girls, aged 15 and 16, were drinking alcohol in public. One of the girls was my daughter. The mother of one of the other girls called me. When I got to the mall my daughter was gone.” Mr. Speaker, she’d already told the RCMP her daughter was on the run, but they never even called her when they encountered her daughter and took away the vodka. The mother asked the police why the kids were not taken into custody until their parents could pick them up. The answer, she says, was they just kept going around and around to the fact that they took the alcohol away from them.
Mr. Speaker, this was another chance to intervene for the good of these young people that got away, but that wasn’t the mother’s first dealings with the police.
She had talked to them about her daughter’s two thefts, totalling close to $1,000. During another incident in the mall, her daughter admitted to the RCMP to taking the money, but they said it still wasn’t enough to lay charges and they refused to escort her daughter home.
Mr. Speaker, this seems like wilful blindness on the part of the police. It’s a ready willingness to let young people go their own way no matter how destructive their behaviour. The police seem determined not to use minor infractions of the law as a tool or an aid in turning a young person’s behaviour around. Obviously, these young people were supposed to be in school in the first place.
Mr. Speaker, these young people are not legally adults until they turn 19 years old. When they’re in the throes of destructive behaviour, and maybe even falling into addictions, they are not capable of making good decisions for themselves. It’s wrong for our educators, social services staff and police to pretend otherwise for the sake of convenience or cost cutting. When we refuse to take action and refuse to help parents struggling with all their hearts to save their children, just what are we doing?
Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted
To answer that, I’ll quote this young woman’s mother again. “So here I am, losing sleep, wondering if my child is safe, what she is doing, and praying that the RCMP will not come to my door and tell me she is dead.” Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. The honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, Mr. Beaulieu.
