Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For four consecutive elections and nearly 16 years I've been honoured to be selected by the constituents of Frame Lake to represent them in this Legislative Assembly. To this day, I am awed to have had that level of trust. Mr. Speaker, I want to make it very clear that even though I've got 16 years under my belt, I have no intention of trying to win the record for the amount of time on replies to opening address.
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I don't like to be called the oldest Member of the Assembly, because by age that's not necessarily true. I prefer the term "Dean of the Assembly," and I hope I can demonstrate some of the...(inaudible)...of that position.
Mr. Speaker, this system of government that we have is unique. It is significantly different than what most Canadians, in fact what most democratic societies, are used to. There are some who don't think it works well; but it works as it should. Over the 16 years that I've been here, I've seen quite a few changes, so I know that it is evolving.
Mr. Speaker, while I'm moving on and it will be up to subsequent assemblies to determine what consensus government looks like, I would like to take this time to reflect a bit on the operation of consensus government.
When I first got elected, I thought that we should move to incorporate some of the trappings of party politics to improve accountability. After just a while in the Assembly, I came to realize that there is some significant advantage to the system that we call consensus. In no other government with ministerial responsibility to a House, do non-government Members have so much power; so much information about how and when government decisions are being made. And that's an important point and I think it's one that many people, probably because they're used to our system, forget.
I had been active in party politics in the South before moving to the Territories. In fact, I was very active in my university for years so I understood how the federal and provincial governments worked. After getting elected here, I was astounded at how much information Regular Members were given. Nowhere else in Canada do Regular Members get to see a budget before it was presented to a House, and have the opportunity to press the Minister of Finance to make changes before it was introduced. Nowhere else did Regular Members have the opportunities to propose changes to legislation while it was under consideration, like we do here. In no other jurisdiction can Members support the government on one issue and the next day oppose the government on another. This is still true today. Other than Nunavut, there is no jurisdiction in Canada that comes close to giving non-government Members the power and independence and how they represent their constituents than they have in our system of government.