Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement I talked about this being the
wrong approach. I’m reminded by Steven Cubby when he talks about begin with the end in mind. I questioned myself as to what the Minister decided at the very start as to where we’re going on this initiative. Did he decide that he’s going to eliminate all these boards? Or did he decide that he was going to strive for efficiencies? I would say he certainly didn’t get the second one right. I think he strived to eliminate boards and I think that is the wrong process.
He has said on record that there will be no efficiencies. So where will we get better services and better quality by rolling up the boards? I can’t see a single one.
I see no shame or loss of respect if this Minister and this Cabinet pulls this off the table today. I see that they speak clearly and hear clearly what the people really want by saying no, we were wrong, we’ll not proceed by doing this.
Clearly this will be a shotgun marriage. Who are we kidding? If you put housing, education, and health together it’s going to lead to nothing but fighting between these organizations over resources. Who is going to stare the housing representatives down and say sorry, you can’t have more money for cancer treatment because we want more gym time. They’ll say, well, do you not care about people? Those are the type of fundamental questions I don’t want this new board to struggle with. Should we worry about health or should we worry about education? What about those people who need housing?
This will bring significant principle errors to the way we should be treating our people. We should be treating them with respect and we should be giving them the leadership they want. They want boards representing them. They want duly elected boards.
What’s on the table today I think ignores everything that people have fought for. They’ve fought for grassroots leadership within their community on the issues they care about. This is one example of how to take it away.
Mixing mandates will never solve anything. We’ve clearly identified that there will be no cost savings. This will not identify efficiencies in any way. If the Minister wanted to deal with this issue up front he could have quite simply had a coffee with many of these boards and said, look, we want to work better together. How can we do this together? In my questions today all I heard was we’ve talked about this initiative for 10 years. I’ve not heard where in the last year the Minister’s gone over to one of the education board chairs, maybe a health board chair, and said, look, how do we work better together? Is it about money? If it is, then just say that. If it’s about process, just say that.
I haven’t heard one iota today or in the last six months about how we can serve the people better on this initiative. I’ve heard about how we can complicate this, about how we can frustrate people, about how we can annoy the heck out of them, and certainly we‘ve done that.
I don’t support this initiative that’s going forward. I think it would be a mistake. If we want to worry about just the principle of efficiencies, then I think we can sit down together and talk about working together closer in a smarter way rather than rolling them all up and calling them a super board. At the end of the day all you’re going to do is continue frustration and anguish, and that’s what we’re going to end up with and that’s not where I want to be.
---Applause