Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are times when people believe very strongly that government has made a decision that is wrong, bad and even sometimes can be described as unfair and unbalanced. There have been numerous cases over the years where MLAs have had difficulty getting full information about circumstances and to be able to get to the bottom of an issue because

often we hit a wall when the reply comes back as this is an internal decision and the details cannot be pursued further due to reasons related to internal management, confidentiality, et cetera.

Mr. Speaker, some of those reasons are fair, and I can respect that, but not all. There are cases out there, for example, when a person has a concern with a staffing issue, whether it was fair or not, the UNW and the government have an appeal mechanism for people to use. Even income support assistance has an appeal board where applicants can have their chance to request their concern to be reviewed. Conversely though, if a person is denied public housing there is no available appeal mechanism. What’s typically left is the person has to request their MLA to write to the department to get the Minister to go back and review the earlier decision. Guess what happens. The person who just said no goes back to their notes to say no again.

Mr. Speaker, I believe there’s a straightforward process and a solution that we could move forward to help our constituents and our people of the North. Many provinces across Canada including the Yukon have established an ombudsman. An ombudsman is an independent and objective investigator who follows up on people’s complaints. Mr. Speaker, they take into consideration the privacy issues and are able to balance them in a fair, respectful and certainly an objective way. The ombudsman can help all parties understand the differences and help resolve the decision and find a solution. This ombudsman could be a statutory officer, of which we have several, and they could be accountable to the government as are other statutory officers, Mr. Speaker, such as we have access to information, privacy protection, language and human rights. We also have ombudsman who could deal with various...Sorry. I’ll have questions for the Premier later today.