Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all I would just like to acknowledge the work of the Government Operations committee in bringing this forward. It was a very long process and a lot of work into research. I would also like to thank the staff behind the scenes for doing the research and bringing forth a very good motion and some of the reports and discussion papers that we had to make our decision on. I would like to thank Mr. Nadli and Ms. Bisaro for taking that one step further and bringing the motion to the floor as we debate it in the House today.
I think Ms. Bisaro and our chair, Mr. Nadli, said it very well on why we need an ombudsman, what is an ombudsman, what they do and some of the powers that they have. We were lucky to have Mr. Andre Marin, the ombudsman for Ontario, here to do a little presentation and the Q and A with the public here in Yellowknife. He gave a lot of really good points in terms of why it’s needed.
Also, just to let you know, Mr. Speaker, we are one of three jurisdictions in Canada right now that don’t have an ombudsman office that need the importance of it. What Mr. Marin had also mentioned last week was that in his office, he has support from all political parties in the work that he does. Even though the recommendations aren’t binding, the government always acts on those recommendations and, in some cases, develops action plans right away when they see some of the recommendations that come out of his office.
The motion is very important as we proceed to creating this ombudsman act, and as Ms. Bisaro stated earlier, if we do have an ombudsman office and they do the investigations, they also have the opportunity to get files, to get e-mails, to get information that we, as Regular MLAs, don’t have access to.
In my job, I have had constituents, in terms of bringing concerns forward, where we have worked with government and we have actually hit a stone wall and we couldn’t do anything further. We’ve tried every opportunity, every avenue. We also looked at some of our other statutory officers to get it addressed, and it feels as though, as an MLA, you fail them but you have worked every opportunity that you can. I think having an ombudsman office would help alleviate that, would speed up the processes and, really, they’re a last
line of defence, last point of contact. MLAs have a lot of opportunities to work on behalf of constituents across the Northwest Territories and residents, but having that ombudsman office, an independent body that can actually do the work and bring out good recommendations, to get them addressed.
I know we’ve talked about the costs of an ombudsman office somewhere around the cost of $400,000. We were lucky; our staff did a great job in looking at some of our contracts over $5,000 that came out of the expenditures of 2013. So an office, to put it in perspective, for the cost of about $400,000 that would help people, help organizations get the answers that they need to do the work that they can do, especially the ones that feel they have been mistreated and treated unfairly by government. Just to put it in perspective, in 2013 we paid $368,000 for one airport garage exterior and we paid $424,000 for one snow blower. Those are just a couple of the examples. But this office would provide a lot of support in terms of the people that feel that they have been done wrong by our governments in the Northwest Territories.
I know, speaking back home to people in my community, there is a lot of support for it and a lot of individuals saying that they wish this office was opened quite a number of years ago. Some people who have actually left the Northwest Territories whose issues couldn’t be resolved and, really, we’re losing people because they have lost confidence in how their cases were handled.
If you don’t know now, I am in support of this ombudsman office. I’m in support of the motion and hope all my colleagues are also in favour. Once again, I would like to thank the standing committee for all the work that they did to get us to this point in time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.