Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The people of the NWT are survivors. With the worst forest fire season in the history of the NWT behind us, it’s time to take stock and give thanks.
Thanks goes out to all our own very hardworking firefighters, suppression crews, air fleet and those outside our territory for protecting our property and saving lives.
That said, this season did consume our grossly underestimated budget of $8 million and we now have over $50 million worth of questions, or at least we should be asking some sort of transparency and accounting to this spending.
It’s important for us to ask such questions as we need to learn how to fight fires more efficiently and be better prepared in the event of another disaster as the 2014 fire season. Questions like, did we have enough air attack officers on duty, especially early in the season, because without such officers coordinating from the air, the entire fire suppression air fleet cannot fly, putting at risk our ground support network. What was the rationale for us not using our entire air attack fleet during the whole season? Why did some of our planes on contract log very few hours at some of our at-risk peak moments? How is our ability to administer the sophisticated science of dealing with fire? Do we have the right caliber of academic people, science officers and tools at our disposal to manage the science of fire? How was our communication with the public? Did they feel informed? Clearly, communication did improve greatly throughout the course of the season, but was this in place at the start? How can we improve our communication even further? Is simply putting a fire icon on a web map enough? Do we need to provide more specific coordinates of fire patterns so property owners and hamlets can FireSmart accordingly? Did we have enough equipment for our front line and property owners to use? Finally, were our communities reasonably prepared with up-to-date fire emergency evacuation plans or overall emergency plans? If not, how do we mitigate this in time for the 2015 fire season?
I believe Members and the public look forward to an informative and frank report from the Minister with the ability to ask these questions in a transparent fashion, and I encourage him to do so sooner than later. Until such time, I wish to again congratulate and thank everyone who coordinated with our fire suppression season of 2014. Thank you.