Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. The Minister of Health and Social Services has spoken about the harm of alcohol to all of our communities multiple times within the House here. We've also heard multiple times about the upcoming alcohol strategy that is expected in the Northwest Territories. I'm wondering if the Minister can just talk to us about what she intends the alcohol strategy to accomplish. Thank you.
Thank you, Member. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want the alcohol strategy to produce better health. We have some very troubling indicators for heavy alcohol use in this territory. For example, the rate of heavy drinking, which is defined as having four or five or more alcoholic beverages in a single sitting, is 43 percent in the NWT. That compares to 19 percent across Canada. Better health means that people are not falling into the poor health outcomes of excessive alcohol use and also not falling into the personal despair of excessive alcohol use. To that end, the department has hired a federally funded senior advisor on the alcohol strategy who started work in August 2020. She is completing the following tasks: setting up a representative working group to guide the development of an alcohol strategy; reviewing feedback from an alcohol evidenced action workshop held in March on this issue; preparing a full workplan and engagement plan on this issue; and this work will be moving along with public consultation that will begin early next year. Thank you.
I'm wondering if the Minister can speak to how they intend to roll out public engagement and make it accessible to everyone, given the COVID-19 restrictions?
I see engagement as a real issue even if there was no COVID. The difficult thing will be to find people with lived experience to participate in the engagement to talk about what will or could have helped them at some point in their journey. I don't have the details of how that engagement strategy is going to work, but I do recognize that hearing from people with lived experience would be a very valuable part of it.
I'm wondering if the Minister can speak to at what points during the development of the engagement strategy will the public be able to weigh in and see how it's going, or will committee be able to see how it's going, as well? Does the department plan on waiting until the very end of the alcohol strategy to then release pieces of it or the whole thing? Where is the public's opportunity to be involved beyond?
This is a fairly new project, but we have offered and are still willing to provide the Standing Committee on Social Development a briefing and to take questions on what committee would like to see in an alcohol strategy. We are following an outline from the group called CAPE, which is the Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation. They have a number of different domains that they suggest an alcohol strategy focus on, so that is the outline we are looking at now. My preference would be to make this an iterative process so that there is more than one occasion on which the general public can be involved in providing their feedback and that the feedback could come in a lot of different forms. It need not only be written. It could be video. It could be voice. It could be song and dance, just whatever it takes to get the information.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary. Member for Kam Lake.
Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. The Department of Finance houses our liquor and cannabis commission and also administers the Liquor Act. I am wondering how the Minister of Health and Social Services intends to include the Department of Finance in this process and how she sees the alcohol strategy influencing the work of the Department of Finance. Thank you.
These different domains speak to a whole-of-government approach. For example, impaired driving countermeasures would involve the Department of Justice; marketing and advertising controls would probably involve the Department of Finance, where the liquor commission is housed there; pricing and taxation and the physical availability of alcohol are also Department of Finance issues; Justice may take on the minimum legal drinking age, which is another recommendation in this set of issues to look at. It's going to be important for the department of health, as the lead on this, to bring all these other departments in so that we can present a coordinated approach to alcohol use. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife North.
