Tom Beaulieu

Again, I’ve got to go back to the fiscal strategy of this government, that we are headed in a direction where we’re going to take a look at some fiscal responsibility, fiscal strategy within the first couple of years, and then within the last couple of years, the House knows that we’re planning on expanding our infrastructure budget. At that point, if this is what we determine is the best use of our dollars, that the best way to address this issue is to put people inside a treatment centre or put six people inside a detox centre and that is the best strategy for alcohol and drugs, then I’ll go...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Probably the first step is to really determine what the actual cost would be for some of the work that we have to do. As I indicated earlier in the House in discussion about the addictions forum, that is going to be some of their work and is going to determine what needs to be done. From there I think we will be able to cost it out and return to this Assembly to get the money necessary to do the work.

We just know that it does cost a lot of money in a lot of areas. Like the Member said, if a person was to stay in a corrections facility for an entire year because of abuse of alcohol, it could cost the government $90,000 to house them in there. We know that a high percentage of the hospital stays are due to alcohol abuse. We know the costs at the health centres due to alcohol abuse. We know that a lot of the money for counselling that is spent on counselling people at the community level is alcohol abuse. We know that at Nats'ejee K'eh another $2 million is all as a result of alcohol abuse...

Mr. Speaker, that work is, again, a difficult type of work. It is not common to talk about alcohol and other addictions such as cigarette smoke and so on in the lower grades. What we need to do is we have to determine at what point that we need to go into the schools, at what age category do we need to target when we start talking about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and alcoholism, smoking and so on. Sometimes there are some issues with approaching children that are too young in the school with these types of programs. We have to determine at what point we go into the schools.

As far as...

The healthy families is not really linked into the addictions treatment. We could talk about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder within these groups where we’re trying to build awareness of the issue and the cost of the issue, as the Member indicated, many of those factors. For the mothers to segue from healthy families into treatment centres, I don’t think is something that is part of that mandate of the healthy families or the community children resource centres.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we found as a bit of a gap in the one treatment centre we have, was determining whether or not we were being successful. We recognize that there are various measurements that can be used to determine the success of treatment. People will be contacted after one year and see if they still remain clean and sober. Then if they start drinking after 13 months, is that considered to be a success story or do we contact them after five years? And if they drink after six years, would that be considered a success story? It’s difficult to determine success unless we’re...

One of the key pieces of the early childhood development work that we’re doing is supporting healthy families in the communities. We consider that to be a very successful program. There are large groups in the communities for healthy families where there are mothers in there at a prenatal stage, right to children under one. There are those types of programs and there are other programs that are in these healthy families for two, three, and four-year-old children with their mothers in a program. A lot of that is our work in the early childhood development, is that we are looking at healthy...

The amount of money we put towards addressing addictions issues is going to be determined by the House. We are going to go through a process, a business planning process. We will make a business case for what we find, our findings. We will have some findings as a result of this committee. Once the forum has done their work and we have our plan in place specific to that, then it will go through the business planning process. The number will be determined by the amount of work that needs to be done at the community level. Thank you.

We are in constant communication with the health authorities across the health and social services. We recognize that we have vacancies across the board in every area. We have 27 percent vacancy in social workers, 16 percent vacancy for nurses. Those are two of the numbers that I know off the top of my head. There are vacant positions recognizing mental health counsellors and wellness counsellors and so on.

We wish there were no vacancies, but we go out and try to fill the vacancies working with the authorities. We do put pressure on the authorities to be able to fill the positions. There are...

If I knew what the plan was I wouldn’t hire a bunch of people to go into the communities to check with the communities what they think the issues with addictions are, and how they think that the addiction issues should be addressed in the communities. The group, in my opinion, in a very short time period have to travel around to the communities. The plan is to come back to this government to what the communities think would be the most effective method in addressing addictions in their communities. That is what we want to move forward with.