Thank you, Mr. Chair. The subject matter of this report is near and dear to the hearts of the business community in my riding of Kam Lake. I am regularly copied on e-mails from many businesses who are involved with government procurement, expressing their frustration around procurement practices. I have raised many of those issues on the floor of this House, asked questions in question period. Unfortunately, the answers received often ended in "We don't have problems with procurement. We don't have problems with BIP. We will explore options, but we think everything is fine." That didn't sit well with me, and I don't think it sat well with my colleagues on the Standing Committee of Economic Development and Environment.
As we were in a position to take the initiative and pursue some areas of study on our own because no legislation was coming forward, this was a top priority of the committee to do its own independent research on it. That started by directly reaching out to stakeholders who interact with the government's procurement and supply system and ask them what they thought of it. It wasn't just Members. It was actually constituents, business owners, Northerners. The results are contained in this report.
I think it is a very good report. Not only did we go straight to the people who are most concerned, we ensured anonymity to allow truthful, honest answers without fear of reprisal, and we had a very excellent expertise analyze those results and put it into a very clear narrative. Anyone can pick up this report and read it and see exactly what our business community thinks about our system. That is a very useful tool. I am very thankful of our chair and of my colleagues on the committee for bringing forward this work.
The two substantive recommendations made in the report are other issues I have brought forward, as well. They haven't had much uptake from the Minister responsible or the government. I hope that a response is provided and we can actually move forward. No one is going as far as to saying the procurement system is broken. What is being said is that it needs improvement. Any system needs improvement.
My mind turns back to a common problem with public procurement in Canada and other western democracies where a decision was made to shift procurement away from expensive, government-owned procurement sources and go to the private section with an interest of driving down cost for taxpayers. Largely, procurement policies that are trying to reduce cost to the taxpayer have been successful, but we have maximized that efficiency. We have gotten the cost down to as low as it possibly can be. What we aren't looking at is how to maximize benefits to our local economy and to northern businesses. That is something that we have some policy clarity on, but it is murky as to how it actually operates and how it benefits.
I think in our government's case in particular, we need to focus on that economic development piece more so than reducing the costs to government, especially when our economy is downturned and hasn't recovered since 2007. It is not going to recover unless we provide some much-needed stimulus. The efforts to date, the great amounts of infrastructure spending, aren't making a big enough difference to get our economy back on track and restore prosperity to the Northwest Territories.
We have to look at other tools. Members have proposed procurement as one of those tools for stimulus. It simply hasn't happened. I hope the 19th Assembly will heed these lessons, follow the discussions and debates of our Assembly, and look at the recommendations in this report and make much-needed improvements to how procurement works in the Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Chair.