Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Following on the statement of the Minister of ENR, this is rather interesting. If I thought my job was depressing last week, yesterday set things up for this week to be even worse. I was aghast to discover yesterday morning that the GNWT had submitted a response to the National Energy Board regarding the recommendations in the Joint Review Panel report. I am not trying to suggest that GNWT should not respond to the JRP recommendations. No, absolutely, we should respond. But if it is the government who’s responding, Regular Members must be included in the development of any response. I am very glad to hear the Minister say that we will be.

I acknowledge that the time frame to prepare a response was short. I acknowledge that it can be difficult to schedule meetings between Cabinet and Regular Members, but really, Mr. Speaker, if this Assembly operates as a consensus government as we keep professing to do, why wouldn’t Regular Members be advised or consulted on a response as vital as this one to the JRP recommendations?

On top of that, as a member of the Standing Committee on Social Programs, I know that that committee had expressly advised both the Minister of ITI and the Minister of ENR that the Social Programs committee wanted to have input into any GNWT response to the recommendations in the JRP report.

As I mentioned in my statement yesterday, I tend to think the best of people, so in regards to a GNWT response, I fully expected that I, as a Social Programs committee member, would be consulted. At the very least, I presumed that we would be advised of any response. Now, not only has a response gone to the NEB without any Regular Member input, but the Minister of ITI kind of forgot to advise the Standing Committee on Social Programs of his actions.

Even if the content of the response had no bearing on the Social Programs committee responsibilities, the Minister had an obligation to copy the committee on his letter to the EDI committee chair. By doing so, he would have shown respect to his colleagues. But we seem to have reverted to the situation we endured about a year ago, a Cabinet who does what they please, when they please, seemingly without regard for the accepted practices of consensus government and without respect for the 11 Members on this side of the House.

We, the Members of this Assembly, are in this job together, Mr. Speaker, no matter which side of the

House we sit on. The Cabinet’s strategic document is titled Northerners Working Together. So let’s try that novel idea, Mr. Speaker, the idea of working together with respect...