Thank you, Madam Chair. You know, I look at this motion here, and I guess I think back to, you know, when the fire started and what happened throughout. You know, I spent most of my time in Hay River during that period. And you know, I saw what was going down. I saw the interaction, I guess, between government, between volunteers, you know, and with the community as well. And you know, at that time, I was thinking, you know, what we need is -- we need some better coordination with all these groups because in the three disasters we've had, what I found was everybody sort of kind of walks away and then you don't really hear much of it again until next time. And as an example, you know, you had a -- we had a fire in the spring and then we had this big fire and in between, there wasn't -- I there didn't appear to be too much discussion.
We also -- the other thing you got to realize too is that in the community, you know, we have, you know, staff and the community governments but they may lack the qualifications when it comes to firefighting. And that's a big issue. They lack qualifications when it really comes to, you know, emergency measures and looking after that in evacuations as well.
So somebody has to take a lead role. And I know that what I find is that, you know, the GNWT will say oh, the community has the lead role and the community says well, the government kind of has the lead role, and there's that confusion. And when you have that confusion, it takes away time and valuable time. And we saw what happens, you know, in Enterprise. We saw what happened in Hay River when we lost valuable time, you know. And so what I'd like to see, I guess, is -- within the Department of ECC is a section that deals with, you know, emergency measures more so. And not just with fires but also with -- you know, the flooding and anything else that we may -- that may come our way. And we need experts in that field. Just like when we -- you know, you talked about doing a review before. You know, we need experts to do those reviews. We don't want just somebody kind of off the street. But we want to listen to people as well who actually -- you know, that went through some of the fires that were on the highway and that. The big thing is that better coordination, better communication. We need a special section within ECC to actually deal with emergencies and preparedness. And we need staff that are actually qualified, and we need that staff to help the communities qualify to make sure their staff are qualified as well. Like, we do in Hay River, we've got firefighters and that. A lot of them are volunteers. And, you know, there's only so much you can learn. You know, we're lucky they were there. We had -- you know, they were looking after structures while the ECC staff were looking after the wildfire. So just -- and those are just comments and things that I guess I saw while I was on the ground in Hay River. I just don't like to see some of the confusion that does happen. And it could very easily be avoided. Thank you.