Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am rising in support of this motion today. In my October 24th statement, I asked the Minister to acknowledge the significant issues in our health care system publicly and put forward to address -- put forward a plan to address these issues. Today I'd like to publicly acknowledge the issues myself.

Mr. Speaker, I have been speaking to health care practitioners for many years now. I certainly spoke to numerous practitioners during the election period. This collection of practitioners have come to represent a concerningly wide breadth of professions and a collective of individuals across our health care service spectrum. To name a few, Mr. Speaker, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, countless different nurses, a number of different doctors working in various roles in our system, people who have worked in management, people who have worked -- and many people who are working on our frontlines. All of these are people whose opinions and perspectives I deeply respect and have listened to with significant concern because they have come to me in desperation and told me that they are on the verge of leaving, or have already left, their positions in our health care system because of significant issues with how the system is being managed. In particular, the overwhelming message I have heard from practitioners is that they feel their voices are not being heard by decision-makers.

I'm going to share one or two of these voices in the House today in their own words. Both of these are people who have left our system to work elsewhere. I quote:

I remember when the unfolding of the new hospital was happening, and we would have meetings about the changes, and they would tell us that our feedback wasn't welcome because the decisions had already been made. Our supervisor asked once, so what do you guys think? And everyone was silent, staring at them. So I said, does it actually matter? Will telling you what we think impact this change in any way? And this person couldn't answer, and everyone got up and left the meeting. It was such an angry and uncomfortable place to work because people have no control over their environment or their role.

Mr. Speaker, the next voice is from a doctor I met with who illustrated for me, in stark terms, that they felt there was a lack of respect for physicians in our system, that they were seen as a problem to be managed by senior management, that they were entitled, overpaid, not working as hard as they should be. This person was concerned that over time, we're going to hollow out the core of our local physicians and replace them with only locums. Mr. Speaker, this person said to me, with I think a lot of sadness, that Yellowknife is a fabulous place to work. They loved the community. They loved their colleagues. In some ways, they felt we were ahead of many southern jurisdictions and so leaving was not an easy decision for them to make.

Mr. Speaker, the fact that so many practitioners' frustrations with these problems had become so great that it caused them to either leave the system, or move somewhere else or leave a career that they care about entirely, speaks to the seriousness of the issues they are speaking to.

What stands out to me also is the breadth of these voices. We're not talking about a problematic unit or a difficult group of individuals. The issues that I've been hearing about have been coming from widely across the system.

The thing I found so perplexing when considering these issues is how fundamentally simple the problem seems. We clearly need to look at how we're managing the system and ensure we are doing a better job of including practitioner voices fundamentally in decision-making and work to do whatever we can to improve employee morale in our system. Perhaps this is a simple statement to make, but it seems that implementing this change effectively has proved to be a significant challenge in our system. So I am of the opinion that we need outside help to achieve it.

There are experts in this kind of organizational change, and I think we need to employ this kind of expertise to help us understand how we can make changes to our management systems to address these issues that so many practitioners are asking for. I believe this work will need to go beyond superficial efforts like an occasional town hall meeting or meetings from time to time to talk about how things are going. I think it will involve fundamental changes to how decisions are being made in the system. It may require structural changes within the system to ensure sustainability of the shift. It will necessarily be a significant change to the workplace culture in our health care system. Making this shift and assessing these systemic issues, in my opinion, needs to be a key focus of an audit of the system, if not the main focus.

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of reason for hope. I studied making changes such as those I'm speaking to in school and would encourage people to take heart in knowing that making these kind of significant workplace cultural shifts is something that a large number of people have expertise in. It is the focus of their careers, and these kinds of change management and organizational management experts can help us make this change. This is something which absolutely can be done. It has been done in thousands of organizations, and it can be done in ours.

I also think there is comfort to be found in knowing that, as I said the other day in my statement on system sustainability, leadership and organizational management theory tells us that the best way to be effective in our decision-making is to consider the perspectives of individuals throughout the organization. So I think making the cultural shift I've been speaking to will open us up to a huge wealth of information as to how we can begin solving the various problems we have in this system. I know that wealth of knowledge exists because I've spoken to so many of these people myself, and I've heard their ideas firsthand. This is an incredibly well educated, high capacity, and passionate workforce, Mr. Speaker. This is a formidable resource to have at our fingertips, and we owe it to ourselves and the residents of the NWT to listen to and implement their ideas for how we can best deliver health care effectively in our territory.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the Member for Range Lake and the Member for Inuvik Boot Lake for bringing this motion forward. I think that, as I've illustrated in my comments today, we have heard from a plethora of voices in our system that changes are needed. They are calling on us desperately to take action. I think this is one of the actions that we can take. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.