Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’d also like to express my appreciation to my colleagues for the work they’ve done in revising the mandate and in hopefully improving it. I want to reflect on some of the limitations of the mandate, though, while I have the opportunity. The first is that it doesn’t really contain priorities. In it there are 200 priorities that range from building a new road at a price tag of $67 million in the current capital budget, to supporting initiatives that will get women elected, at a cost of $15,000 or so. There is no sense of the weighting in this mandate, of the relative importance or scope or cost of those different items. The thing that I regret most is that we have too many priorities, and with too many of them we don’t really have a sense of urgency around which ones need to be accomplished immediately and which ones don’t.
It’s also worth noting that there are some major initiatives being undertaken by the government that never were in the mandate. I’ll give you a few examples. One is departmental amalgamation. There was nothing in the governance section that talked about theneed to undertake departmental amalgamation. I believe that was driven by the fiscal realities, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. It was not something, however, that we had agreed to as a priority, and it wasn’t something that we made a priority, and yet it became a priority. Likewise with the drive to set up the airport revolving fund. The change in governance for the Yellowknife Airport is not something that appears anywhere in this document, and nor does removing the board of NTCP or Aurora College.
What has developed is a kind of two-tier approach. There are the priorities of the government and there are the priorities of the Caucus, and this document represents the priorities of the Caucus. It doesn’t represent what the government has decided to do for reasons of its own. That’s a real limitation.
Having said that, this document is cited by every Minister every time something is done, that it is in the mandate. If it isn’t in the mandate, then it doesn’t get done. There’s kind of a double jeopardy that goes on with this document.
It’s full of good intentions, but it’s not necessarily full of ways and means. As a result, I think we’re setting ourselves up, despite the glowing reviews on the government’s mandate tracker, for a lot of unfinished business in this 18th Assembly because we’ve simply taken on way more than we can possibly accomplish, not only fiscally, but in terms of the capacity of the departments that we work with to get the job done. I’m happy that this work is done. I think it’s better to revise the mandate than not, but I think the document has some real limitations, revised or not. Thank you.