Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Now that the dust has settled on those two dreaded words, “board reform,” I have some suggestions to offer going forward.

Some have suggested a special committee. A special committee is something that is struck by the Legislative Assembly, funded by the Legislative Assembly, commissioned by the Legislative Assembly, and the findings of the special committee reports back to the Legislative Assembly. In the past we’ve had some of these to deal with major issues on our agenda. Very costly. I don’t think we’ve had one yet that’s come back at a cost of under $1 million. I don’t know what we would actually find out if we had a special committee on board reform, so I can’t support that.

I don’t think that a joint committee of Cabinet and MLAs at this point would really serve this purpose very well either because when I mentioned the words ”constitutional development’ I was suggesting that what we were proposing as a government in terms of board reform could launch us into constitutional development talks and a full constitutional forum, because the federal government devolves authority to our territorial government and our territorial government devolves authority to the regions and communities. If we were going to, with one fell swoop, wipe out that participation in the communities and regions, I would suggest that we would have some extremely unhappy aboriginal governments throughout our Territory. And they would necessarily be looking to the federal government to come in here and solve this problem. I wouldn’t really support just Cabinet and Regular Members either. I think if we want to go back to our priorities of the 16th Assembly and

talk about political development, we have to be very cognizant and inclusive of our aboriginal leaders as well.

We have something under our Refocusing Government Strategic Initiative Committee called the program review office. I think that we would be wise to encourage that committee and that office to continue to look at efficiencies and effectiveness department by department, and wait for and invite regions to come forward with efficiencies that they may be able to identify themselves. I’ve said before we have a lot of very pressing issues on our plate right now and I think we should totally dial back any further actions with respect to board reform.