Thank you, Madam Chair. The sessional statement was a very extensive checklist of the initiatives that this Assembly has undertaken. Also, I think it covered a fair number of ongoing programs and projects that carry through from previous assemblies. I guess in this particular message, Madam Chair, I didn't see any pronouncements or announcements of anything substantively new. Perhaps my expectations were maybe a little out of line in that respect, but it is an opportunity for the government to signal some new things that may be taking place out there or that are in the offing. It's the kind of thing that I would encourage the Premier and the Cabinet to undertake, especially at the start of a session, as something that gives us a fresh platform and projects a strong and positive and proactive government at work in contrast to, I guess, as I say, Madam Chair, sort of a checklist or a review of essentially what we already know is underway.
Something that is becoming more and more evident in our government and in the kinds of decisions and initiatives that we can undertake is that we have less and less discretion as a territorial government to make strong, forward-looking, innovative moves. The kind of thing that I'm looking at -- and I'll just give one example, Madam Chair -- would be in the field of advanced educational research. I think that there is a great potential in the North, a great need and a great potential to really advance the areas of science and technology. I would really like to see the NWT, I think as our partners or sister territories of Nunavut and Yukon are going to be doing, jumping on board national and international programs to advance sciences. We have so little discretion in our capital planning. We have so little capacity within our civil service. There is so little capacity at the level of industry to undertake this kind of forward-looking initiative, because we're working so hard at keeping up with the essentials and the forced needs that we find ourselves dealing with because of all the economic activity that's going on.
In the last Assembly, Madam Chair, the phrase was coined, "we're going broke looking after all this prosperity" and it's true. In the last few weeks we've gone through business plans. We'll see more of that in the coming months as the budget process opens up. We've got so little room here to grow this Northwest Territories. I'd like to say from my point of view, I'm becoming more frustrated with the lack of discretion, the lack of opportunity that I see here in this Legislature, as an Assembly, as committee members, as Cabinet, for us to really say this particular project is a good idea, let's use the sciences one. But do we have the capacity or the room to do anything with it? No, not at all. It's because we have such more pressing needs looking after the housing, as we just talked about, the transportation, the water and sewer infrastructure, those kinds of things.
I reflect on what seems to be a growing list of things that are out there on maybe a stage or they're in a regulatory format or perhaps we're talking about an interim plan to do something. There's so much going on that's out of the control of the Northwest Territories, but it impacts us so heavily that we're in a bottleneck. We're in a kind of limbo stage here and I just wanted to try and illustrate this from my point of view, Madam Chair, as something that is one of the dynamics that we're playing with right now. We don't know if a pipeline is going to go ahead, but, by golly, we better make tens of millions of dollars of investment in training alone to be ready for something that we don't really know is there. Hydro developments; wonderful legacies of both the mining and oil and gas industries that we just don't know if we should do it yet because we're not there yet.
The devolution arrangements that we've talked about in the last couple of days; maybe it's going to be really hard because there are land claims and self-government agreements to get in place first and maybe we should do an interim agreement.
Without going on and on and on, Madam Chair, I wanted to illustrate that we're in a situation right now as a government where it's difficult to do more than manage on
a month-by-month or maybe a year-by-year basis. It's hard for this government to look that much further out because so many of these major, major projects are outside of our control. I won't say they're outside of our influence, we can certainly influence things, but it's a delicate time right now and kind of a frustrating time from my position here as an MLA.
To be a bit more specific on a couple of things that were mentioned in the Premier's sessional statement. We have so many forums and avenues for consultation and I really do want to strive to enhance, to grow, to strengthen, to build on the consensus style of government that we have right now. As a matter of fact, maybe Ottawa could be looking at what we're doing because they are learning with the minority situation they have down there, I think they are learning a little bit about how to try to achieve consensus and keep the place going. But we have the Intergovernmental Forum that was created about four years ago, the Aboriginal Summit not long after that. This spring we created, along with the municipalities and the aboriginal organizations, the Circle of Northern Leaders. So we have an abundance, and perhaps an over abundance, of various consultative and governance and decision-making agencies and avenues. I certainly don't want to say that I am against these, but to what level do we stop creating all these forums and actually start using them and engaging them in our work and unity that is so critical and so important to us in the next few months and years, Madam Chair, if we are going to really achieve a future for the Northwest Territories that is inclusive and is consensus building, and yet that allows so much diversity to co-exist? Thanks, Madam Chair.