City councillor Rick Orr at the launch of the Community Alcohol Strategy. Photo by Chelsea Laskowski
An alcohol strategy four years in the making, in a city plagued with public intoxication arrests, has been unveiled in Prince Albert.
The community alcohol strategy delves into some sobering data. It isolates how much of Prince Albert’s police budget went towards public intoxication lodgings and arrests over three years ending in 2012. That number is $2.5 million.
Another example comes from a one-month study period in 2012. At that time, one-third of Prince Albert’s child welfare reports were directly related to proven alcohol and/or drug abuse.
Trina Cockle is on the strategy’s steering committee, and is the president of Prince Albert’s chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
“As a community we needed to confront some challenging realities. But the strategy is not about complaining about the darkness; the strategy is about turning on the light,” she told an audience of about 50 people in Prince Albert City Halls foyer on Tuesday.
The data used in the 61-page document was actually produced more than two years ago, and that isn’t the only part of the strategy that is dated.
When it comes to alcohol consumption, the strategy also lays out of vision of where participants want the city to be within the next five years. That question was asked and answered in 2014. This means the vision these participants had is for 2019, three years from now.
The strategy also touches on the obstacles to those goals, and the actions that need to be taken.
After the data collection phase of the strategy, there was little action until the steering committee was struck.
City councillor Rick Orr represents the City on that steering committee.
“Our hope is that we’re going to change the culture of how alcohol is dealt with by the citizens in our community and that we’re going to end up with a way that people will understand there’s ramifications for the way that they deal with it (alcohol),” he said.
The 120 people who helped with the strategy want to shift Prince Albert’s entire attitude towards liquor, he said.
“We’re not coming up with the solutions or implementing the actual ways that various agencies react. What we’re doing is we’re talking about the whole community as a whole, about a culture, and trying to change the theme in our community,” Orr said.
Even though they’re four years into the work on the strategy, Prince Albert has a long way to go to reverse those troubling statistics.
Tuesday’s launch is not the end of the road for the alcohol strategy.
There will be two community consultations in May, where people can provide input into the strategy.
An updated strategy and action planning will follow.