Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate this opportunity for MLAs to share our initial input on what we feel should be the priorities of the 20th Assembly. I see this as a first step in what will be a more robust and complete process than has occurred in the past. Today, I will primarily speak to the platform I put before residents during the election and committed to bring forward if elected. Of course, we are going to hear 19 different perspectives today and are yet to hear from our partnering organizations. So I look forward to coming together with my colleagues to do the difficult and necessary work of forming a collective vision which captures as many perspectives as possible without losing focus.
I want to emphasize my awareness of the fact that it is GNWT's staff who are responsible for implementation of priorities set by MLAs. For this reason, I think it is critically important that we receive staff feedback and advice on how priorities can best be achieved. We also need staff input into measurable and achievable goal setting as part of this process to ensure that MLAs and administration have mutual understanding of what success is expected to look like. We should, where possible, align our goals with work which is already taking place. This will ensure consistency and that we don't lose initiatives staff have put valuable resources towards. However, I want to emphasize that we are going to have to realign some resources to ensure priorities are successful. One of the key failures of past priority setting has been lack of commitment of funding and resources towards ensuring their success.
It is also important to ensure priorities aren't siloed. In the past, a given priority has tended to be connected to a particular department that other departments may not consider how it affects their work and may even inadvertently work against it. We need to pay attention to how departments relate to one another and the role they play in affecting and implementing priorities if they are to be truly successful. I will now present the priorities I committed to bring to the table.
I am bringing forward two overarching priorities under which I have nested a number of initiatives which will be evolved in achieving them. My first proposed priority is making the Northwest Territories more liveable. It is a fundamentally simple priority however underpins so much of what I've heard from residents during the election and the work GNWT is or should be engaged in. Under this priority, I propose the following initiatives:
Addressing the housing crisis. We need to increase the territorial budget for housing, create a long-term plan in partnership with Indigenous governments and NGOs for increasing housing stock and access and seek stable funding to implement it.
Reducing cost of living. Specifically working to decrease basic living costs for lower income individuals and families who are struggling to make ends meet.
Increasing access to affordable child care and ensuring that changes to federal child care funding do not negatively impact child care providers and parents.
Investing in and evolving the primary health care system to improve health care access and outcomes. This includes mental health and addictions treatment with an emphasis on growing and strengthening aftercare.
Increasing accessibility for person with disabilities and ensuring extended health benefits coverage is comprehensive.
Working to improve outcomes of early childhood education in the K to 12 education system.
Adapting to and mitigating climate change. We need to be better prepared to face the challenges of increasingly extreme environmental changes. As a first step, it is important that an external review of the 2023 wildfire response and community evacuations be done with recommended -- with recommendations for changes to ensure past mistakes are not repeated.
Responding to climate change, if done right, is an opportunity to reduce cost of living, generate any economic activity, and protect the environment for future generations. But decarbonization needs to be done in a way that doesn't put further strain on residents who are already struggling to make ends meet. We need to simplify our climate strategy, prioritizing changes which will most quickly reduce the territory's reliance on diesel. Much of this work will be at the institutional level, but we can also include programs which help residents make changes that get their private homes off of diesel.
My second proposed priority is economic development and diversification. Under this overarching priority, I propose the following initiatives:
Continue transitioning Aurora College into a university and growing the knowledge economy throughout the territory. This will create jobs, help people build capacity, and bring more funds into the territory.
We need to continue to invest in and develop our tourism and art sectors, both of which have more potential than is currently being realized.
Settling land claims to help Indigenous governments realize the benefits of self-government and the associated benefits of direct federal funding to support those government's authorities and bringing much needed capacity to our regulatory system.
Ensuring that the regulatory system balances the need for environmental protection with economic development and does not prioritize one over the other unreasonably, particularly measures which could be taken to extend the life of existing mining projects should be explored. This would help to ensure employment continuity while other sectors or projects grow over time and ensure maximum benefit is obtained from sites which have already been disturbed.
Ensure procurement favours NWT owned and staffed businesses and helps them grow.
Actively preparing for closure of Diavik Diamond Mine by ensuring employment continuity for residents affected by the closure and that impacts from reduction in contracted activity are minimized.
Maximizing benefits of the growing remediation economy in the territory and ensuring as many residents and local companies benefit from remediation as possible. It's worth noting that in many cases the diversification elements I've spoken to are more about simply capturing benefits from activity that's already occurring here as opposed to creating new activity.
On top of these priorities, I am also proposing several guiding principles to apply generally across the government. I am hoping that together the priorities and guiding principles will speak at a high level to not only what work GNWT prioritizes but how the GNWT will work.
My proposed guiding principles are as follows: One, focusing government services and initiatives on helping those with the highest need first. This may seem like an obvious principle and is already the case for many GNWT programs; however, there are a surprising number of initiatives which end up inadvertently providing assistance in such a way which does not adhere to this principle. Where necessary, we need to refocus programming to ensure we are helping those who are most in need.
My second proposed guiding principle is being flexible, adaptable, and collaborative in our work. Put simply, I would like to see the government shift to more collaborative models of working being solutions oriented, open to change, and less risk adverse.
My third proposed guiding principle is implementing results-based management in our work. The GNWT should, at a bare minimum, be able to explain what value any of its programs are creating for Northerners. Even better is measuring the impact of programs and initiatives and changing and adapting as needed to maximize value and impacts.
The fourth is better characterized as initiative than a principle but it is empowering our workforce and shifting workplace culture by implementing modern theorys of leadership and management throughout the GNWT.
Something that's really stood out to me working in the North for as many years as I have is that the GNWT is full of passionate subject matter experts and the vast majority of people who work here care about their work, want it to achieve positive outcomes, and have ideas for how that can happen. I think the systems and policies of government can have the tendency to inadvertently get in the way of these ideas or getting in the way of them making their way to the top.
I also know that a common management problem in any organization is that often excelling in a specific role leads a person into management, but they may not have much specific training in managing people. We need to entrench ongoing leadership training and capacity building into the organization to ensure we are developing leaders who know how to build and empower effective teams. Training and capacity building is also a key to increasing Indigenous representation at higher levels in government, something we can't achieve with affirmative action alone.
This concludes my initial contribution to the priority setting process. Despite being quite long, this does not represent a comprehensive list of all the things I would like to see the government work towards over the next four years. Today I wanted to bring forward the main things I committed to in my platform and which came forward during my campaign, as I said I would. There is still much work to be done. While I maintain that we need to be strategic and focused, I also note that significant amounts of GNWT work proceeds without much political direction and should be considered by MLAs either through the priority setting process or through committee work. I look forward to further honing our priorities in the weeks and months ahead. Thank you