Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, over the past week, there have been a fair bit of discussion about what model would be best. My colleague was just speaking to it also. And, you know, I've really appreciated that discussion. I've appreciated the coverage in the news. I think there's been some excellent coverage helping to inform residents about the decision being made today, what's behind it, and the details.
Mr. Speaker, I'm not 100 percent sure an inquiry under the Inquiries Act is the perfect solution, but I can say that right now it is the best solution which has been brought forward yet.
I appreciate that Cabinet has attempted to work with Regular MLAs. They brought a proposal forward. I would argue that the proposal didn't quite get there. The previous Speaker spoke to that a little bit. Probably what I found the most difficulty with is that I was allowed to speak to it a little bit, I did engage with my constituents, but the scope of work was not made public. It made it very difficult for me to stand behind that publicly for several reasons. The biggest one being, of course, how am I to engage residents and, you know, take a temperature gauge on public opinion for something that they can't see? How do we expect people to opine on something they haven't read?
And this leads to some general frustrations that I've had, or I guess things I've puzzled over since I started in this role. And one of them has been that much of the work conducted in this Assembly, much of the work conducted by this government, is done with confidentiality written on the documents. Many of the documents I receive are confidential. And I think my key frustration with it is that I can say with almost 100 percent completeness that none of the information that I have received, which has been marked confidential, has been sensitive. Much of it is just day-to-day operations. Much of it is here's the substantiation for the work that we're doing, these are the reasons we're doing it, this is what's going to be done. And so I have been puzzled as to why things are marked confidential in the first place. And I think one of my frustrations with this is I think that the reason behind this is a desire for mitigation of risk but based on what I've seen, there is another risk, and that is the disadvantages associated with people not understanding what their government is doing.
Mr. Speaker, during our orientation process, we've had a lot of briefings with government staff. Or AOC recently had briefings. Our AOC committee had briefings with a number of different departments where departmental staff came in and answered detailed questions about the work they're doing, gave us briefings on particular projects or initiatives the government's working on. And I want to be clear that those briefings gave me a lot of confidence in GNWT staff. It helped me appreciate enormous amounts of work that are being done and the quality of that work. So what we're missing out on by doing much of our work behind closed doors is public confidence in the good work that government is engaged in or the opportunity to have conversations about what's not working and of course correct, as we might have done if a proposal for a fully arm's length review with draft terms of reference was brought forward to the public. So let's turn to the inquiry itself.
First of all, I want to say I'm glad that we took a bit of extra time. This allowed for a healthy public debate and resulted in better informed decision-making and time for engagement with constituents, which I really appreciated having. I've had many people reach out to me with their thoughts, and I think that that helps us make better decisions when we hear from our constituency, when people who put us in this office reach out to us and tell us what they want.
I will say, Mr. Speaker, that the majority of constituents who have gotten in touch with me are in favour of a public inquiry and have been quite clear with me about that. Some of those voices are coming within the government. Some of those voices are coming from folks who are on the outside. But the message is fairly universal. I want to emphasize that the vast majority of what I've heard is not related to anger; rather, it's an acute interest in getting good recommendations for how to learn from this incident and move forward in a better way. That has been emphasized to me by many residents, and I want to emphasize that in this House too, that that's what people are looking for.
I have also heard from some constituents who are either strongly against or who are expressing reservations about an inquiry. It's important to me that I amplify these voices also and ensure that their concerns are heard. The major concerns I've heard are related to costs. As we know, we're entering a time of fiscal restraint, and residents are quite reasonably raising concerns. There are concerns around what an inquiry might cost, that costs could spin out of control. It's been raised to me that the format of a public inquiry and the formal format that that entails could potentially be a barrier to participation. I think some of the amendments that were brought forward today speak to that and have tried to mitigate that concern. And another concern that's been brought forward to me is the potential for an inquiry to prolong and amplify trauma which has already occurred in the territory.
I want to say that I share some of these concerns, and I have taken the time to investigate them extensively. I've had a significant amount of research done by legislative staff and read through it, how this has been handled in all the other jurisdictions that have been dealt with wildfires, what a public inquiry entails. Our committee had a briefing from an objective lawyer where we asked all the questions about the Inquiries Act, how it works, the parameters that can be put on inquiries, what an inquiry is and isn't. So I feel quite informed coming into this decision today.
So what I will say is that getting the establishment order right is critically important. This is an opportunity to constrain the scope, the cost, and the timeline associated with a public inquiry. And so that is important in addressing some of the concerns that we've heard.
So I'm going to turn now to talking about things an inquiry needs to be and things it does not. I believe, like many of my colleagues have already emphasized, Mr. Speaker, that it needs to be fully independent from government to instill confidence in the results. Again, I spoke to risk and the risk of people not understanding what's going on. The risk here, of course, is that we do a review, people aren't confident in the results, and the issue continues to burn -- no pun intended here, but the issue continues to smolder in the background. I think if we do this right at the outset, then people will have confidence in the results, and we can move on.
I think it's incredibly important that a review be focused on systemic change, not finding individual fault and blame. I don't think there's a huge amount of value to be found in individual fault. Individuals within a system act in their role, and the role often dictates how action takes place. So if we have an ineffective system and we replace individuals within that system, I strongly believe that individuals would continue to make the same decisions if the system itself does not change. The system dictates action. It is very difficult to escape this phenomenon. An example I would give is the structure of this Assembly and the different sides that you see taken based on which side of the structure you end up on. The system often and the role dictates action.
In particular, Mr. Speaker, I think the most valuable information we need to get a clear picture of and recommendations for, and where I think the most confusion took place, was with interdepartmental, interagency, and intergovernmental coordination. This is where I've heard the most concerns and where I think the focus of a review needs to be. Governance in the GNWT is shifting, Mr. Speaker, where responsibility is being increasingly devolved to Indigenous governments. So we need to ensure recommendations also focus on this unique governance structure in the NWT and its implications for emergency management.
I think it is fair to acknowledge that many aspects of the evacuations and response went well. A huge number of residents evacuated our territory safely. As my colleague eloquently noted, it is not clear the level to which this was due to coordination or luck. This, again, emphasizes the need for an objective review which can come in and help us get at these questions. And, again, as was so eloquently emphasized by my colleague from Yellowknife North, we need to focus on where people fell through the cracks; how we can prevent that from happening again. That's where I feel we need to be focusing a review.
I want to speak a little bit to lessons I've learned from this process that we've gone through and the process that we continue to go through as we're voting on this motion. I believe very strongly, and this was emphasized to me most strongly during your priority setting process last week, that this group is at its strongest when we come together as 19 individual MLAs. The lesson that I take from this is that I think we need to use Caucus more effectively. I've conveyed these thoughts to the Premier and colleagues. I want to emphasize that relationships and collaboration are incredibly important to me, and I want us to continue to work together and change the way we work as need be to better facilitate consensus-based decision-making.
I want to speak a little bit to, you know, something that is a bit of a passion of mine, conflict theory, and the differences between healthy and destructive conflict. There have been times in this Assembly where destructive conflict has created a lot of division, and that is something that I heard from residents when I was going door to door in this election, that they want to see professionalism and they want to see the MLAs focused on doing good work. One thing that I have not seen during this debate is destructive interpersonal dynamics. Rather, what was has taken place is a respectful and substantial public debate on an important decision regarding how review of government takes place. This, Mr. Speaker, is exactly the kind of conversation we should be having in this House. It's a healthy discussion. It's an important discussion. This is how representative democracy works, and I think it's working well in this case. And I thank my colleagues for the respectful level of discourse that I've seen in this House from the day we got elected. I think we're doing a great job in that respect, and I really appreciate it.
I want to speak a little bit to the events themselves. Facing the circumstances that we did, I think it would be unfair to expect that everything would have gone perfectly. I want to refer back to the briefing I spoke to with staff. We had staff come in and explain to us how the event went down, and you know, what it was like being first responders. And what really struck me is the level to which this was a much bigger and more challenging fire season than anything we've experienced before is really humbling and scary when you step back and look at it. The word "unprecedented" was used so much last summer that it became a trope, but there is no other word to describe what happened. The NWT has never faced anything like what happened last summer. During that briefing, I reflected on this summer and the fact that until that moment I don't think that I had realized I hadn't taken the time to consider how much the events had affected me, what it felt like to fear for the safety of my family. And I was very lucky that that fear was short lived and much less consequential than others. I can't begin to imagine, Mr. Speaker, what it felt like to lose a home, to evacuate and later receive news that your community had burned.
Mr. Speaker, I can't imagine what it would have been like to be on the ground as frontline staff and firefighters and have the weight of responding to this event, of protecting communities on your shoulders, and how it might feel to have to make the call to pull back from the fire to protect human life and know this would result in lost homes. A lot of frontline staff came away traumatized, demoralized, and it's really important that they not be forgotten here. And it's important for me to emphasize that we and the public deeply appreciate the difficult and dangerous work our frontline staff engage in to keep us safe. So, again, Mr. Speaker, I want to reemphasize that systemic failures are what need to be the focus here, not individual fault, and that is what I really hope comes from this review. I hope that the parameters that are put on the review ensure that this happens. Again, I would speak to the establishment order in ensuring that the parameters in that order are gotten right, and I think that the way that this motion has been constructed is to ensure that there's collaboration on that establishment order and that there's contribution and public discussion about it to ensure that the parameters are just right, that we get this thing right, that we're not focused on the wrong things.
So to conclude, Mr. Speaker, I am voting in favour of this motion because we need a fully independent review of the incidents, most importantly to learn from them and to ensure we are prepared when we face challenges like this in the future. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.