Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

NNSL (Aug 30/99) - Fort Good Hope's K'ahsho Got'ine Community Council has passed a motion supporting an RCMP initiative to stop people from getting more alcohol than area regulations entitle them to buy.

RCMP Cpl. Marion Lamothe said the police had heard comments from many people in the community that people were buying liquor on behalf of other people or even deceased people.

"We said we'd look into it and we came up with a card system that was in effect several years ago."

The RCMP are asking people to come into the police station to show identification and sign a card saying that they want to buy alcohol.

The cards will be forwarded to the Norman Wells liquor store and in the future when the people want to order by freight, someone at the liquor store will look up the card and confirm that the signature matches.

On all future freight orders people will have to mark their name, how much alcohol they want and provide a signature.

"This way we'll know who's in Fort Good Hope at the time," said Norman Wells liquor store manager Sadie Wiley.

"Before we didn't know who was in town or what their signature was like."

The current regulation is that each adult Fort Good Hope resident can order or bring into the community a 40-ouncer and 12 beer per week or a 40-ouncer and two bottles of wine or bottle of wine and 24 beer.

The same restrictions are in effect in Norman Wells, but are broken down on a daily basis instead of a weekly basis.

"The motion that we passed said that council is in favour of people having to sign the cards," said Coun. Ron Pierrot.

Previously, as long as the liquor store received the person's name and the amount of alcohol they wanted to buy, getting the alcohol was easy, according to Pierrot.

As such, it was easy for a person to get alcohol for other people.