Thank you very much there, Mr. Speaker. I share my colleagues’ concerns and I, too, stand with them on this debate on the GNWT Board Reform Initiative. Effective and efficient is an expectation of our public and our people. The people are not convinced that this is what the Board Reform Initiative is about. There are still no clear and important reasons to make people understand why the changes should take place. I don’t think that people are afraid of change, Mr. Speaker, but they are afraid of not knowing; not knowing what these changes will bring.
Often in my experience with government, sometimes we’ve got good ideas out there and we work hard to find solutions to them, but sometimes those ideas fall apart when we choose to implement them. As other Members have spoken about recent experiences and the most recent one was the harmonization of income support. They had this great idea that they would create this one window for people that need income support, need housing assistance, we’ll put them in one central area and everybody goes there. But what happened there, Mr. Speaker, is it ended up being a detriment to the people. We created hardships and, in fact, in housing we created a whole group of people that are in arrears to our government and now they don’t have to answer those. Still, that was a good idea, a one-window approach, but implementing it was a huge fiasco and I still fundamentally oppose that. Just the same, that is the kind of feeling I am getting about the Board Reform Initiative.
At the best of times, government guidelines and policies are difficult to interpret and understand and now we are talking about creating a whole new way of administrating education, health and housing. In question period, we asked the Minister were there any other models or are there any other ways of presenting board reform and they really weren’t able to answer that. In fact, the rollout package only included one model, Mr. Speaker. At the minimum, it should have included this model or keep things the same. At least that’s an option, but the way it’s being presented, there are no options being given. I think that creates a lot of the concern, a lot of the pressures from the public saying wait, slow down, why are you trying to give us something that we know anything about.
In my Member’s statement, I spoke about apples and oranges, Mr. Speaker. That’s exactly what we are looking at. We want to take something that has its own unique way of doing things like in health and then we are taking education and we are actually trying to merge these two. They are fundamentally diametrically opposed. They are very, very different entities and now we want to throw in housing as well, Mr. Speaker.
The arguments that the Ministers use, they say they want to gain efficiencies, they want to join HR functions, they want to join administration functions and if they were to use those arguments, they could use those same arguments if they wanted to join, say, the Workers’ Compensation Board and the Power Corp Board, Mr. Speaker. Those two are just as fundamentally different as the organizations that the government is looking at joining as well. It really doesn’t make sense when you look at it this way.
Just yesterday, I was talking to a constituent that didn’t know as much as we do about the issues and I was trying to explain it to them. That person looked at me and said that doesn’t make sense and, she’s right, Mr. Speaker. It just doesn’t make sense.
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So I think that the government has no doubt used many resources and staff dedicated to develop the plan as it is. But it will only be overshadowed by the huge resources that we dedicate to the implementation of this Board Reform Initiative. The public is, indeed, looking for leadership, Mr. Speaker, but there are other pressing, important issues in our Territory that demand our attention. There is the high cost of living, power rates, fuel costs, housing costs and, to add to the mix, an economic slowdown.
Our Territory is a year behind what’s happening in the United States and southern Canada. We are only going to be impacted at a later stage, probably
at the same time the government would be implementing this. This plan is creating undue stress that our people do not need at this point, Mr. Speaker.
I will just conclude by saying that I believe that our current system is effective. I also believe that the proposed changes will not provided improved services to our people. I am not in favour of the proposed Board Reform Initiative, Mr. Speaker. I will be voting in favour of the motion. Mahsi cho.