Thank you, Mr. Speaker. According to the Legislative Assembly's own website, the role of Regular Members is to sit as the unofficial opposition. They are "responsible, through questioning in the House and the work of standing committees, for holding the government accountable and responsive to the people of the Northwest Territories."

For Regular Members to do their job effectively in holding government accountable and responsive to the people of the NWT, Regular Members require expedient and complete access to information of government activities. In our current system, all information requests by Regular Members must go through Cabinet and their staff, then to the department, and back again to Cabinet, eventually answering Regular Members. Cabinet members have extra staff to handle their workload, discretionary funds to appropriate as they see fit, and maintain a tight grip on access to departments, agencies, and information.

Simple requests for data sets will often be answered by an executive summary written by departmental officials, and in the past, Regular Members have had to pay for out of their own pockets and file ATIPP requests to get answers from the GNWT on legislative reviews of bills before committees.

Mr. Speaker, the House has the paramount responsibility to oversee the public purse, among other duties, and paramount is ensuring the laws of the land proposed by the government reflect the will, attitudes, and aspirations of the people.

Regular Members need a system that functionally permits this, and our current system places barriers and challenges in the way. Regular Members should not have to have their access to government information filtered through a Minister's office. As far as the membership of this House is concerned, in the much-derided partisan institutions of the South, there are backbench MPs who can speak directly to deputy ministers in those governments to get information. That is something simply not permitted under our current standing procedures.

The restrictions on Regular Members which currently exist in the operation of our consensus system ensure that they are left in the dark at the best of times, and typically, only one perspective in public policy as written by government is provided to them. This is inherently contrary not only to the values of consensus, but also wholly contrary to the values of good government.

Mr. Speaker, we desperately need to fix this system and make the job of Regular Members more consequential to the operations of government and more effective to their constituents, because they are first and foremost the reasons we are here, to represent their attitudes and not the will of government. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.