Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation. I won't take a lot of time.
I'll give you a brief understanding of Drayton Valley, and—this is not unique to Drayton Valley—the leadership our community took. It was an entire community effort.
About seven or eight years ago, when I first came on council, we started looking at the issues of drug and drug-related crime and how we could bring the whole community together to deal with these issues. We had created a community coalition, if you will, of stakeholders broadly based throughout the community. At that point in time, we were starting to hear from the police about methamphetamine in our community.
That stakeholder group was already together, and what we did was apply for a federal grant, which we were very grateful to receive, to hire what we called a community mobilizer, someone who was going to teach on the education prevention side to the students, teachers, businesses, and the entire community about the prevention side and the facts about this drug. On the other side of it, we had a community police officer.
This particular mobilizer was a past drug addict who had quite a bit of understanding of drugs and the drug-related crime, had been recovered for many years, and was a great person to have with us and working with our RCMP.
Also at that point in time, we had what was very unique for a community of our size in Alberta; we had hired a two-person RCMP GIS or general investigative services team to deal with the drug and drug-related crime. We were taking a holistic approach to this: prevention and education, as well as working with the RCMP on the enforcement side.
As we were working through this, we became aware that Drayton Valley and the whole corridor on Highway 16 in our community was starting to have a methamphetamine problem. Later we found out that there was a major drug house within that corridor on Highway 16, which was later taken out.
In discussion with the prevention team, and in particular when one of the RCMP members came to one of our committee meetings, we asked the question: what can we do, if anything, on the legislative side that would help this? We're working on the enforcement and on the prevention sides, but is there anything with regard to legislation whereby we could start the ball rolling to have an impact not just for our community but across Canada?
We had a discussion, and what we did as a council was create a resolution with our RCMP and their supervisors out of K division. I believe you have a copy of that resolution in front of you. It was first sent to our Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and approved. It was then sent to the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties, which is the rural association in Alberta, and they approved it, and then together that resolution was formatted and taken to the federal Canadian municipalities. So all the municipalities within Canada had the opportunity to review, discuss, and approve this resolution.
I know you have that resolution in front of you. Really, what it speaks to in the “therefore” clauses is about urging and requesting the Government of Canada to implement regulations that will strictly control the sale and possession of large quantities of chemicals used to produce methamphetamines—and it lists some of those as examples—but also to institute reporting requirements associated with the sale and possession of these chemicals. We felt very strongly, as did the majority of all federal Canadian municipalities, which approved this, that this was very important legislation.
Drayton Valley has.... I sat on Premier Klein's task force a year ago—