Please note that while all due care has been taken to accurately transcribe this address, errors or omissions may have occurred during the transcription process. NOFASARD takes no responsibility for these errors and this is transcribed in good faith. For purposes of the written rather than the spoken word, small changes in grammar and wording have been made.

I am pleased to announce that the Office of FAS in Alaska has received a five-year grant of US$29m. I am here to tell you that as a Yukon Senator I am not going to be able to provide that sort of funding however I do have an offer if the national FAS community is interested.

In the early 70's I was a Juvenile Court Judge and a Justice of the Peace here in the Yukon and certainly many of the persons in my court were suffering from what we know today as FAS which of course we didn't know what it was. We knew that alcohol had something to do with it but we didn't know what we know today.

In 1993-1994 I was the Executive Director of the Alcohol and Drug Treatment Centre here in Whitehorse and although I am not professionally trained in this field I do have a pretty good understanding of the disease of alcoholism.

I have been in the senate for the last three years and last fall I decided that I wanted to start looking for a focus, I had another five years in the senate and after thinking things over, I decided that FAS would be an excellent issue for this senator to take on.

FAS isn't just an Inuit problem, it's a national problem however in the North it's highly visible and we have faced it and are no longer in denial.

In 92 there was a House of Commons sub-committee that produced a report "FAS the Preventable Tragedy". There were 21 recommendations came out of that report and most of those recommendations have not been acted on. In 1995 an MP introduced a Bill called the "Private Members Bill" that was for labelling that you see a lot of support for right across the country and in the House but due to strong lobbying from within the industry Bill C22 died in 2000. So I think it is time for a renewal of some of these initiatives.

The government of Canada addressed FAS in the last budget and we have a Health Minister who has set FAS as a high priority and I certainly will be honoured to be a part of it on your behalf across the country to find solutions for FAS.

Its going to be a long term process to build it up but you are the ones who are going to have to tell me what the need is.

Senator Ione Christensen pledged to all the delegates at the end of the conference that she would make the cause of FASD her priority in the five years that remain of her term of in the Canadian Senate. She invited us to contact her at chrisi@sen.parl.gc.ca any time with ideas and issues about FASD.