Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am grateful for the colleagues around me and all of our ideas and contributions. I'm grateful to live in this place and in such a home of the Dene and Metis peoples and to be able to call it my home too. I've had the privilege of doing work in all regions of the NWT. I understand that our territory is a collection of many worlds, many realities, but I truly believe that we are all connected and when the smallest community or the most vulnerable amongst us suffers, we all suffer. Those of us in Yellowknife must find common cause with other communities while empowering each community to find its own unique ways to address our common problems.
I spoke with many constituents who have become so discouraged in recent years, who are struggling to believe that change is possible in government. But through our conversations, we're persuaded to find some hope. It sounds contradictory, but I am both buoyed up by that hope and feel the weight of it because over the next four years, people need to see real improvements in their lives and in how the government operates if our residents are to believe in this community and to invest all they have to offer here.
I'm going to present each of my four priorities as outcomes, not as categories like housing or economy or health that could easily be slotted under just one department. My vision is that each priority will require a whole-of-government approach, meaning that all Cabinet Ministers and all GNWT senior leadership will become equally accountable for achieving each one of them.
My first priority relates to how the GNWT operates in our workplace environments. First, I want to share stories I heard on the campaign trail from various GNWT employees. See if you can hear some of the common themes as I've been trying to do. I talked to doctors frustrated that they spend the bulk of their time doing administrative tasks or work better suited to another health care professional instead of seeing the many residents who cannot get a family doctor assigned to them. I heard of many nurses and doctors quitting their positions, some who have practiced here for a long time, to work as locums or in administrative jobs because they are so frustrated with the inflexibility of the bureaucrats who manage their time. I heard disappointment from employees who saw extremely qualified northern Indigenous candidates turned away from job opportunities due to narrow requirements for educational qualifications or a requirement for the position to be based in Yellowknife. I talked to an employee in the education department who's not allowed to talk to anyone at the schools and cannot even answer an email without waiting weeks for approval from up the chain of command. I talked to employees who are passionate about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels but spend their days fighting with colleagues in departments of ECC and Infrastructure and ITI over who is actually in charge of this, while struggling to even get a meeting with anyone over at the power corporation. I talked to RCMP officers who are frustrated about being asked to use policing tools to deal with problems that are essentially about under-housing and poverty. They've been asking the GNWT for years to set up joint street outreach teams that include social workers or outreach nurses and mental health counsellors, but to no avail. I've heard from folks working to integrate supports for the under-housed population but are dismayed that integration often means lower level staff sit in meetings all day with dozens of interdepartmental committees while deputy ministers continue to point fingers at each other instead of making recommended changes.
The reality is that we will not accomplish any ambitious priority that we set out for ourselves in this Assembly until we get our house in order, which leads me to my first priority outcome which is ensure the time and energy of the GNWT workforce is well spent by fully utilizing their expertise, roles, and creativity. Our government is made up of many competent, dedicated, and knowledgeable individuals who find themselves embedded in a system that often demands that they paint by number, a system that is fixated on the risks of fresh ideas while ignoring the risks posed by the status quo.
As the previous examples illustrate, there are real and costly consequences to wasting people's time and having extremely low morale in the workplace. We are used to auditing the monetary side of our government's output, ensuring money is spent responsibly, but I think it should be equally important to audit whether people's time is well spent and whether their talents are being efficiently mobilized. And a key aspect of this will be ensuring more productive relationships between decision-makers and staff, starting right from the top with us. There needs to be the trust and the freedom for leaders and staff to respectfully challenge each other so that information and ideas can flow more freely, and we could find the creative and flexible solutions necessary to get us through the hard times ahead.
This shift in management culture will take courage and leaders willing to take risks to withstand criticism, to admit mistakes, and to learn from them. I believe that healthier internal relationships will lead to healthier external relationships, such as with Indigenous governments and with municipalities. And so while this priority should cut across all departments, I would suggest we focus immediately on human resource management in the health care system as it is not only a matter of life and death but also one of our most costly areas to manage.
My second priority outcome is increase the supply of decent affordable housing in every region, setting targeted increases for market housing, public housing, and supportive living facilities with built-in case management and harm reduction programs.
So many of you are well aware that affordable housing is fundamental. We can't grow our workforce until new staff can find homes. The shortage is crippling local small businesses and preventing us from hiring teachers and health care workers amongst others. We cannot get people off the street or move people who are currently in supportive living facilities into independent housing until there is something for them to go. And with nonexistent vacancy rates, we have no hope of seeing rent prices go down. With overcrowding, we see more family violence, more children in care, and poorer health. It's a downward spiral in urgent need of a course correction.
So I think we cannot afford to spend any more time discussing whether this needs to be done. The question is how are you going to chip in and participate. Every department should see a role for themselves, whether it's making links between housing provision and teacher recruitment or links with services such as aftercare from addictions treatment or changing policies such as income assistance that are part of the problem.
We do need better care for those struggling with addictions, and I would argue that addictions care should be closely linked with supportive housing facilities that include case management and harm reduction practices, both before and after formal addictions treatment programs. Examples of groundbreaking programs that we can build upon are the K'asho Got'ine Housing Society's men's group home in Fort Good Hope and the YK Women's Society Spruce Bough facility here in Yellowknife.
My third priority outcome concerns energy, electricity, and the climate crisis. We need to ensure our public utility is governed by industry best practices and aligned with a broader territory-wide plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Some of the top concerns I heard from constituents were around high electricity prices, increased reliance on backup diesel generators, aging hydro infrastructure, and the overall absence of vision by the power corporation on how we are to cope with a rapidly changing climate and a world that is abandoning fossil fuel based technologies.
A myth has been perpetuated that the North is so different that no viable renewable alternatives exist, yet our citizens and industry are finding cost effective ways of reducing their carbon footprint. When it comes to climate change, the residents of the NWT want a seat at national and international tables. They want to be part of the solution, and they want a public utility that is forward thinking, efficient, manages its assets well, and invests wisely in proven renewable technologies.
My fourth and final priority outcome is build a healthy resilient northern workforce with the confidence and built-in supports to continually learn new skills and adapt to changing economic opportunities.
First I want to speak about the economy. I fully appreciate the deep fears many have shared with me about a downward economic spiral as the diamond mines begin to shut down. But I want to point out that our economy is already weak because it is full of massive leaks. Currently only 37 percent of the diamond mine workforce actually lives in the NWT. An even smaller fraction of the Giant Mine remediation workforce is northern. Almost all of the workers in our construction industry are temporary workers from the south. Even the local company that services my furnace brought a guy all the way from Newfoundland this month to fix it. So despite our leaky ship, I know some are advocating for spending our limited public funds on infrastructure that we hope could lead to more mineral exploration that we hope could turn into big new mines. Now, that's a lot of hoping and a lot of risk. We may indeed need more mines to create enough jobs but international commodity prices present uncertainties far outside our control. So here's my fear, that if we venture out into those risky and volatile waters with a leaky boat, we will sink. If we invest in industry infrastructure instead of investing in our people, then even if all the stars aligned new mines could employ relatively few Northerners and mine benefits would flow south. So the first step in our economic strategy must be to plug the leaks and invest in our people.
In this modern world where a workforce for an industry such as mining can be flown in and out from literally anywhere in the world, we need to create an economy that plays to our strengths, that produces things rooted in this land and in our peoples and cultures. It must be built on a strong education system infused with community connections and mentorships, taking place on the land wherever possible, meaningfully integrating local languages with health care services, both mental health care and physical health care, that are available in all educational facilities. It must be focused on building up a sense of confidence, identity, and passion for lifelong learning. And as we integrate immigrants and newcomers who come to fill the vacant positions, we need to also embrace them with our tight-knit communities to give them powerful reasons to stay here.
So there's a chance this Assembly could be faced with more emergencies, a new plague, new natural disasters, but this doesn't mean that our priorities will become irrelevant. In times of emergency, our weaknesses become magnified and the foundational priorities that I've outlined become all that much more important.
So in conclusion, I propose that we get our own house in order first, unleash the productivity and creativity of our GNWT workforce, focus on housing and energy system foundations, and plug the leaks in our economic boat by building up a healthy confident skilled workforce that is rooted in this land and these communities. Thank you. Mahsi. Quyananni. Merci.