Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect. The thing that we need to do, I believe, is improve our relationship as the elected Members with the public service. We need to show respect to the public service, and we need to listen to their concerns so that they don't get dealt with during contract negotiations. That is the worst time to try to deal with everyday concerns.
That is why I talk about things like having some sort of a feedback loop, where these frontline concerns that people are talking about for years on end actually get dealt with. A lot of times, the complaints are things related to mental health. We heard them talk about that in the contract negotiations. Well, if you are listening to people, and you are improving the situation on an ongoing basis, those don't become concerns.
We need to do a better job with the timing of these meetings. I thought that I was an idiot because I would look at these meeting schedules and see months in between them. I thought, "Oh, I guess that's how negotiations go. It doesn't make any sense to me, but these guys must know what they're doing." No. You can't wait six months between meetings. You need to be at the table and hammer something out.
I know that there are practical issues, but we have to get over that. We almost had a strike here. There were businesses around the territory that were hurting. There were people who didn't go travel to see their families, because they didn't know if they were going to be able to afford it. These are real life issues.
The other thing that we need to do is have better communications amongst ourselves during negotiations, because as a Regular Member in the last Assembly, I didn't know what was going on until basically the eleventh hour when we got a briefing, maybe two briefings, during that entire time. Again, the Regular Members need to be able to provide feedback and show the public service that, as the elected Members, we are all concerned about this issue.
Those are some of the changes that need to happen because not only does no one want that to happen again, but we can't have it happen again. Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect.