Thank you, Mr. Chair. A little while ago, in this session, I believe that the Premier made a statement that she had overwhelming support from the Indigenous governments. Then we hear today that many haven't even gotten back to her. I think this is just an example of the confusion that surrounds the creation of this unit and how the misrepresentation of the facts seems to be happening. I can't support increasing government employment at a time when there are so many other needs in our territory. We spent the last few weeks here in session discussing our housing crisis and the last six months on how inadequate our healthcare system is to deal with this pandemic, and our government's solution is to take funding provided by the federal government to deal with COVID and create more layers of government, more bureaucrats.
I understand Cabinet isn't too worried about job losses or businesses going under, since it appears their solution is just to ensure that everyone works for the GNWT. The statistic of 4,000 jobs lost, a staggering statistic given our population and demographics, rolled off the tongue of the Finance Minister pretty easily. You know why? Because they're all private-sector jobs. Coming from the private sector, it's absurd to me that we considered spending millions of dollars on more office space and a handful of senior bureaucratic positions. I believe we were told those items alone would cost a few million dollars. When employees returned to work, why did we not rejig the offices then, create the needed space at that time, and reconfigure? Especially if this is a temporary department and a lot of the GNWT employees are continuing to work from home, the rental of new space seems like a waste of money to me.
I would like to see the federal COVID money used to hire nurses, purchase equipment and PPE, support the private sector, create a public safety department instead of this secretariat, and bring together all the varying departments that protect our people under one department so that, when another crisis hits, we will already have all our services coordinated. That would have been way more useful than something so reactive that is way too late and past the time it was needed. If it had already been in place for so long and you've already gone ahead and spent all this money, how come nothing is improving? You've gone ahead, you've done this, so what good did that do for us in the recent cases? In the situation of the gym exposures, contact tracing wasn't even performed. Instead, a panic-inducing public announcement was made hours after a list of contacts could have been obtained and called, reducing the potential spread by hours. Instead, that did not happen, and we were only lucky that other cases didn't occur as a result.
The Cabinet hides behind the CPHO in deflection of any questions around contact tracing and such. I don't understand, then, why creating more GNWT employees and more bureaucracy is supposed to improve that, when really, that's where we want to get our answers from. That's where the issues lie. There are no communications between you as the Cabinet and the CPHO. I don't see that creating more bureaucratic layers and crap is really going to do any good. Thank you.