Ile-a-la-Crosse Mayor Duane Favel. Photo by Chelsea Laskowski.
At the New North annual Mayor and Councillor meeting in Prince Albert on Thursday, a number of municipal leaders delivered passionate speeches on drug-involved crime and addiction in their communities.
“We’ve got the users and we’ve got the dealers, and they’re all community members. They are all family. We’re all family, sitting around here,” said La Loche Mayor Robert St. Pierre, as he said he wanted harsher penalties for drug dealers.
His comments were made in response to a motion by Ile-a-la-Crosse for New North to lobby the feds and province to help combat crime by giving local governments “more powers to deal with drug dealers, such as banishment of individuals convicted” of drug trafficking. Mayor Duane Favel acknowledged the Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional to banish people from municipalities, and later said he used that extreme example to stimulate meaningful dialogue.
The motion was passed, but the idea of banishment was struck down by numerous leaders like Buffalo Narrows Mayor Bobby Woods who said banishment just passes “off our problem off to another community.”
St Pierre said treatment is a necessity for users and that “banishment doesn’t cut it. We need to heal. If we want to move forward we need to heal. We start with our young ones. We teach them, we educate them, we move forward,” he said, adding that “if there’s no users there’ll be no drug dealers.”
While St. Pierre said more people need to speak up to RCMP about drug dealing, Sandy Bay Mayor Paul Morin said reporting crime is not easy when – as it often is in the close-knit communities – the offender is a family member.
Sandy Bay Mayor Paul Morin. Photo by Chelsea Laskowski.
“There’s internal consequences that follow that,” he said, giving a hypothetical situation where he reported someone.
“Now, I’m dealing with animosity and hatred from my own extended family members for what I did, doing the right thing.”
He said to deal with that conflict, he draws from the history of his community and a childhood that was “simplistic, living off the land and with the land.”
The community lost its way of providing for its own and of following the teachings of the Elders, Morin said, his voice was thick with emotion as he stood to deliver the best-received comments on the motion.
“At the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, the onus of what goes on in our community is the responsibility of us that live in it, and we are a living product of that,” he said.
Favel said all communities clearly understand they need a well-rounded approach to addiction which draws from law enforcement, preventative education, and treatment “and right now that’s non-existent in our northern communities.”
He said in his decade or so with New North he’s heard the same conversation on addiction and crime many times over, and his motion is intended to bring about action and more “frank” discussions with higher levels of government.
Also on Thursday, New North’s membership passed two resolutions: to lobby the province on increasing solar power use and other renewable energies in the north, and reducing the obstacles to producing more renewable power; and to lobby the government to introduce a northern alcohol tax.
Green Lake’s mayor pointed out that milk costs more in the north than the south, but liquor is the same across the board.
In the afternoon, the hundred or so people there also held an informational meeting on gangs.