Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 22/99) - Northern Addiction Services board president Earl Johnston says the decision on the treatment centre's future must be made quickly because of its dire financial situation.

"There's a letter from the housing corporation telling us about our mortgage being in default, which we were well aware of, and that we have to start doing something about it or they will start legal proceedings," Johnston said.

Doug Johnson, who is the public affairs co-ordinator at the NWT Housing Corporation, said legal proceedings are a last resort and the housing corporation would prefer not having to go down that route.

Still, he said NAS had cheques that bounced Aug. 1 and Sept. 1 and if the cheque bounces on Oct. 1 the corporation will likely start legal action by the middle of the month.

"This is all part of the agreement for the mortgage," Johnson said.

"And for the two payments that they missed, we still had to pay Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation back so we're in the hole for that."

Johnson said so far no one from NAS has even phoned the corporation to explain their financial situation or plans.

Though the NAS debt is tagged at $948,562, executive assistant Gail Greyeyes said much of that is due to depreciation of assets such as the building itself.

"If you have a car that goes down in value $2,000, you don't usually say 'I lost $2,000,'" she said.

Most of the debt is carried over from 1998.

Greyeyes said there would have been further in debt in 1998/1999 as well had the centre not received an injection of about $135,000 from the GNWT to help their financial position.

Johnston told those at the centre's annual general meeting Sept. 16 that the board's priority is to keep the deep-in-debt treatment centre functioning.

"The back-up plan has started," he said.

"We had hoped that Corrections Canada programming was going to come through by about this time. It now looks like it's more distant than we thought and that's why we had the meetings with the department of health in the last week to 10 days."

Johnston said recent meetings between NAS representatives and Health Minister Floyd Roland resulted in Roland pushing to have a youth program at the facility.

For both options, a consensus among board members and society members seems to be to have the families involved in treatment -- not just isolated individuals.