Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Consensus government, at its core, has a transparency problem, and it not an easy problem to solve without all of us in this House making some sacrifices for the public good. In our system, Regular MLAs are awarded a great deal of input into decision making. We see draft budgets, draft business plans, draft budgets, and draft legislative proposals, and we are given ample time to comment and provide input to those draft decisions. In many cases, Mr. Speaker, Cabinet actually listens to Regular MLAs, and I commend them for that. I understand that some Assemblies have done better than others at this.
However, Mr. Speaker, whenever something is draft, it is marked "confidential" and any discussions take place in secret. A by-product of this is that most decisions, by the time they are made public, much of the hard work and debate has been done. This often results in an anomaly where we pass things in this House with little or no comment.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I want to note that this is not any better in a party system where the solution is simply not to share information with the opposition, and sometimes things become public all at the same time as a surprise to opposition MLAs and the public. Clearly, this is not a solution to the problem, but it is often framed as the alternative. If MLAs are unhappy with doing business planning in secret, then they can wait and review a finalized document in public, but changing finalized Cabinet documents is a rare and difficult occurrence.
Mr. Speaker, the real solution here is a large dose of transparency at all levels. A dose of transparency that requires all of us becoming much more comfortable working with draft proposals publicly. We also must be much more comfortable speaking of when we failed to act.
The GNWT being an inherently risk-adverse organization, often the decision to do nothing is the most important and the most common. As an example, Mr. Speaker, our Affirmative Action Policy has not changed in some decades. However, if you weed through the multiple committee reports and you glean that it has probably gone to Cabinet multiple times, or at least to committee, and yet, nothing has been done. From the public's perspective, no change or effort to change such an important policy has ever occurred, yet repetitive decisions to fail to change it are often what has occurred.
Mr. Speaker, much of the work we need to do is set out in the GNWT's open government policy. However, we have heard little what the steering committee for that policy does, being made up of public servants who ironically meet in secret. One part of that work is an open data portal. I will have questions for the Minister of Finance on how we can become a more open government. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
