Thank you, Madam Chair, for recognizing me. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this.
Just because they didn’t follow the normal process doesn’t make it any less important, and I think that’s an important fact. It doesn’t make it any less important or any less necessary. I think the Premier spoke about some of the issue. He didn’t say any of my issues. I have problems with communications, and I will give them to his list so he can add them.
I personally think communications needs to be better coordinated. It’s my opinion that we should have a communications secretariat in some way that actually works directly with the Premier’s office in a manner that disseminates out. We create a chain where we work with newer communications folks, work with more experienced ones, a little bit of a network there that all tie together. That way everyone is working from the same page and they understand what departments are doing and even that feeds up better to the Cabinet table. I would prefer a system that works more integrated than the one we have now. Is this the right approach? Well, maybe one can look at this as the thin tip of the wedge that we’re trying to start, the smallest piece, and hopefully it will expand beyond that.
I think we don’t demand accountability of our communications people in the same way that we do
out of our politicians. We have to have a system that can meet those demands when we put the pressure on them to communicate better, as we’ve seen in the past. We have high expectations here, and how do we do that when they’re all in these little pockets all over the place beating to their own drums or coordinating in their own methods but, as I said earlier, not integrated.
I’m not sure. Well, frankly, I really don’t care that they came late to the table with their request. To me it doesn’t make it less important.
The last point I’ll say is in this modern age, I’m not sure all the communications positions need to be in Yellowknife. I say that because some of them are new. I think maybe it would make sense that the coordination of them might be where the masses are, obviously. But in this modern day with the way people communicate it’s not the same as in the old days whereas they all had to be at the same table, face to face, pressing flesh directly with each other. In this modern day you could have a communications expert in every single region rather than nestled ever so comfortably in every single department. That’s not to say I’m suggesting any one of our communications people don’t do any good work. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just, we need to look at, sort of, how we organize them, as well, and I would certainly hope that that would be part of the longer term goal, because there could be some great opportunities here to find regional positions out of some of these, out of all of these positions. I’m not speaking to these three and these two which are obviously five positions, but I’m also speaking about the whole suite of communication positions of probably about 20 or more.
I won’t vote for the motion. I do appreciate my colleagues’ perspectives, but at this time I simply just don’t share it.