Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was arranging some notes. I appreciate that you recognized me. I have been very quiet this year, Mr. Speaker. It has given my constituents some concern since I had plenty to say during the 11th Assembly when you were a Member of this Cabinet. For four years, I used every conceivable place on the order paper to raise issues of concern to the people who elected me. One criticism I heard time and time again during the 11th Assembly from my colleagues in the Cabinet and outside of it was I talk too much. My constituents told me, on the other hand, that I did not talk enough, so I have had to compromise. At least I am here every day, and I do make some contribution from time to time. I was also told by several of my constituents that my publication, the Blade, which was used as a means of keeping in touch with my constituents, was too light-hearted and frivolous. I needed to bring weightier matters to their attention.
There are sometimes bizarre and unusual goings-on that take place in this Legislative Assembly. If I had wished, I could have published some hilarious issues in the Blade this year, Mr. Speaker, but I resisted. It has been an unusual year. It has also been the most painful of all the years I have spent in the Northwest Territories. I represent the people of Yellowknife Centre, which is an incredible mixture of people, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal. There are wealthy people who live in penthouse suites in detached homes on beautifully landscaped lots. There are single people who live in single rooms at the Gold Range with a bathroom down the hall. There are old people who have lived here all their lives and who have paid their dues, and they live at the Avens Seniors' Centre or the Mary Murphy Centre.
There are homeless people who stay at the Salvation Army. There are other homeless people who sleep in any warm doorway they can find. There are many kinds of settlers in this community, Mr. Speaker; people like myself who came to this country, were fascinated by it, raised a family, and have felt part of something very important and very special. I feel it has all been very worthwhile, a life well-spent, beginning on Baffin Island and ending up thirty years later here in the capital city. The soul of this community, however, is not government or bureaucracies. The soul of this community is mining. I grew up with mining people. They are tough, resilient people with a big sense of community and comradeship shared by all men who work under difficult and dangerous conditions. My father often told me, "you will not like it underground, son. You will meet great people down there. You will make great friends, but the roof is very heavy and there are no windows." It seems to me ironic, Mr. Speaker, that in the year that we see the destruction of the Miner's Mess at the Yellowknife Inn, we feel chaos in the mining industry which was its inspiration.
Forever etched in our memory will be the most devastating mining disaster in our history. People whose roots go back to the 1930s and 1940s and the early shacks of a gold mining town, feel that there is an industry in danger of collapsing around them. As an elected person, I have never felt so weak and so helpless in all my life. We see around us only a glimpse of what lies ahead for us as a society.
What lies ahead for the people of the Northwest Territories are problems which can only be solved by tremendous courage, intelligence and an incredible amount of hard work and dedication. What I see on the other side of this House is a handful of people working very hard but with no sense of where the people want to go. I have no doubt we have a hard working Premier. I have watched events unfold throughout the year with a sense of dread and frustration, Mr. Speaker. While much of our labour force in the mining industry is on the ropes doing its best to defend itself, our government finds itself in an almost identical position.
From what I was able to learn this weekend, the public has lost confidence in the system by which it is governed. Over the weekend, I heard the following comments:
-We should ask the federal government to step in and take it over;
-There should be an immediate general election so we can turf the whole lot of you out;
-We should start a petition so that people can really express their opinion;
-This government should go into receivership like anything else that goes belly up.
I have been quiet a long time, Mr. Speaker. The survival of public government has been my passion and my main reason for remaining in politics. The government we now have is the one we have claimed to be proud of for so long. We no longer have executive government, Mr. Speaker, what we have is consensus government, and what a nightmare it is. The Executive is just one more committee whose Members are paid a substantial amount of money to be held hostage to the majority where the most powerful and the most threatening within that majority decide which Minister should have the next week of sleepless nights.
My friend, John Ningark, summed things up best last week when he said, "our problem could be summed up in three sentences: 1) There are people like myself who are happy to serve in any way they can; 2) There are people within the Cabinet just renting space and I am not sure for how long; 3) There are others just waiting anxiously to move in as soon as a space becomes vacant."
In the 11th Assembly, we saw the need to organize ourselves as ordinary Members so that we could hold government accountable by working together. This had never happened before. There was never any feeling among this group of ordinary Members which we call Ajautit, which means to push people, that we were a government-in-waiting. We were not there to topple people over and then bet on which way they were going to fall. It simply organized itself so that we could get good government, and many of you remember that.
The 12th Assembly has seen the Ordinary Members' Committee and the Standing Committee on Finance bring the Executive Council to a complete standstill. It is no longer a matter of working to make government accountable; it is a matter of engaging in a power struggle day after day after day. There are people fighting for turf and others defending their turf.
This is supposed to be the best of all possible models of government, at least that is what we tell the rest of the country, since everyone is involved in decision making and in sharing power. Unfortunately, as everyone plainly sees, it just spells chaos. Public confidence in what we do here is rapidly disappearing. Some people believe that there is an intentional undermining of public government so that there can be a new beginning for aboriginal people. There is a strong belief that there are native people who are intent on destroying public government from the inside. By far, the majority of people I have talked to, however, believe that we are incapable of governing ourselves; aboriginal and non-aboriginal people alike.
This Assembly is only a year old, Mr. Speaker. Already, many of my constituents are sick of it. People want order in their lives. The city is in a mood of deep anxiety. The public service is demoralized. The private sector is in bad shape. Mining faces a very uncertain future.
I was not fully aware of the depth of this feeling, Mr. Speaker, until I talked with several Yellowknifers on Saturday morning. I completely lost my voice by this time and did a lot of listening. This seems to have come a long way from being a response to the Commissioner's Address, Mr. Speaker, but the Commissioner lives on my street and I know he likes his addresses, no matter how short, to be replied to.
It would be my proposal, Mr. Speaker, that Mr. Ballantyne, Mr. Dent and myself be nominated from the floor on Wednesday so that Yellowknifers can at least witness, one more time, that they are correct in feeling the way they do about what they thought was their government.
I am not going to go around soliciting anybody's nomination or anybody's vote. I am talking about one quarter of the people in the Northwest Territories. People are angry and frustrated.
To end on a humorous note, Mr. Speaker, which I will try to do and I hope you will appreciate it, I could offer Ms. Cournoyea to join our Cabinet for a salary of $1 a year which she could pay me out of her own pocket. I could also give her my undated letter of completely unconditional discharge. For any western Members still breathing like a furnace to take up one of the seats of the not-so-mighty, she could then offer them my seat at the same salary. I cannot think of a more imaginative solution to the current power struggle to which I can see no end.
Mr. Speaker, for the sake of my constituents, I should also give one more explanation of why I have talked little during the past month.
A year ago, I undertook to work, once again, on a private Member's bill enabling breweries to be established in the Northwest Territories. I wanted to work on some practical project which could lead to the development of a small, environmentally friendly industry in the north. I did it because I believed it could attract investment, create jobs, and lead to a distinctive northern product.
To guide a private Member's bill through this Assembly is time-consuming and requires a lot of patience. It also means that I have to be kind and full of good will to all my colleagues. I do not know if it is un-parliamentary to say this, Mr. Speaker, but it is not my style to kiss anybody's backside for anything. Being quiet and full of good will is the closest I could get to it. I would like to thank the Members for allowing Bill 9 to proceed, for I believe that it leads to the further reduction of our dependence on our imported products.
Meanwhile, the public awaits with great cynicism the next chapter in our evolution. I hope after this week I will no longer be hearing words like "Mickey Mouse outfit", "Disney Land", "Demolition Derby Politics", or "Kamikazi Assembly". Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
---Applause