Thank you, Madam Chair. And, yeah, I'm sorry, I was just waiting to see if some other Members -- oh, thank you, Madam Chair. I was just going to see if other Members wanted to speak up but in absence of them, I will definitely share some thoughts.
Yeah, I have a bit of prepared comments here and will try to go off the cuff a little bit also. So I'm going to do my best here to speak to the mandate specifically and not the business plans, because they are separate documents, we are looking at them separately, but at this point I do think it's difficult to separate the two because anything measurable is contained in the business plans and lack of measurable targets and tangible action was one of my main concerns with the draft mandate when it was first presented to us. And certainly I shared that sentiment in comments to my colleagues in caucus and also in a follow-up e-mail.
I appreciate the government tabling the business plans publicly, and I'm hesitantly open to the idea -- to supporting the idea of putting measurables in the business plans if the plan is to make the documents public going forward, which it is as I see right now. We can discuss the level to which measurable goals have been sufficiently included in the business plans when we discuss those specifically.
For the mandate, I would say that for the average citizen and, indeed ourselves, the disadvantage with this new approach is that we have made figuring out exactly what the government is doing and when it plans to achieve it a much more difficult and convoluted task.
So the business plans are a 280-page document. So currently, there isn't a place where a person can quickly look to the mandate and determine what the government is specifically working to achieve under each mandate statement or item. The mandate statements are quite broad, and I think could be criticized to be saying a lot of things the government is currently working on. So it's hard to say that this is particularly visionary.
I think that this is a gap which the government should work to address in its public communications and suggest it would help both the public and Members to better track and hold the government to account for mandate progress if we did have a place where we could access the mandate and the very specific measurable items that are associated with it. I realize that's going to be in the business plans but, again, it's a 280-page document and we can't quickly go through those and sort of identify targets.
So on one hand, we have created much more focused priorities, which I was a strong advocate for and I'm glad we achieved, but the government has taken those and expanded upon them to the point where they are now attached to a document which is hundreds of pages long and, as I can personally attest, takes days to pour through in detail.
So the mandate itself. The mandate as tabled speaks to challenging status quo and driving positive change. When I look at the 2024-2025 Budget as proposed, I found myself questioning how much are we really challenging the status quo and, particularly, questioning the government's understanding of what the process of priority setting truly involves. I'll speak to that sentiment more in response to the budget itself.
To the mandate itself, I will say that for the most part, I agree with and appreciate the sentiments shared by the previous Speaker, the Member for Yellowknife North. I do see myself, particularly in the priorities that were set by caucus, by the 19 Members, I am pleased to see housing at the top, strong economic foundation, access to health care. Those are things that I specifically campaigned on and committed to residents to bring to the table as priorities and so I'm very happy to see those in there. So I think that we were focused in our priority setting, and I am pleased to see that those priorities are being spoken to throughout the business plan. So I do think the government has done its best to focus on the priorities when implementing the business plans. Again, I'll speak to those more in specific tomorrow.
So the difficulty with the mandate, of course, is the lack of measurability in it. And I think that it remains to be seen if the process of attaching mandate to business plans is going to be an effective way to track progress and hold the government to account. So I think that probably how I can most helpfully provide comment here is just to speak to each individual item and what it means to me, because I haven't had a chance to kind of speak to the mandate itself.
So housing. What did I mean when I brought housing forward as a priority?
To put it quite simply, what that meant to me is that we were going to be increasing housing stock available to residents in the territory, making it more affordable to get into housing in the territory and, in particular, also investing in operations and maintenance of housing in the territory, which we have fallen woefully behind upon. And we simply have not been funding O and M of housing at the level to which we need to over the past number of years, focusing more on capital projects. And so the difficulty with that, of course, is that housing stock is slowly decreasing in quality and needing repair and falling out of repair and having to be taken offline when what we need to be doing is kind of maintaining what we have and building more. So that's what I meant. And so we've said that we're increasing housing availability. Whether we have, as the Member for Yellowknife North mentioned, kind of a solid plan for doing that, I think we have not yet quite articulated what our long-term plan is and what we're really trying to achieve. So I'm hoping that we can get there with the business plans.
I am going to speak to the economy -- it's amazing how quickly we run out of time here. Speaking to the economy, I think the one that I want to speak to the most here is growing and enhancing the northern workforce by investing in skill development and attracting skilled workers to the NWT. I very much appreciate that this is the top item in economy. And I have more to say on this topic when we get to business plans and perhaps a reply to the Budget Address. But the bottom line, I'll say, is that the foundation of a strong economy is people, and the reason for building a strong economy is people. And so investing in people through housing, through education, through health, I think is how we build the foundation for a strong economy. And that's mostly what I meant when I was speaking to that.
I think that the other items that are in here are things that I contributed to and agree with also. I think I agree with the comments made by my previous colleague there on power infrastructure and just acknowledging that there's a little bit more to this than just green power generation and transmission.
Access to health care. I'm quite happy with what we've put in here. I think it's simple. I hope that it's achievable. And certainly what I was saying during the election, and what I brought forward as a priority, is focusing on access to primary care in the NWT. And that is at the top of the list here. So I am pleased to see that.
As for the next ones, addressing the effects of trauma, emergency management, I think I am pleased with what's in there. Again, whether we can be measurable in what we're doing, I have some comments specific to emergency management that I think I'll save for a statement because they're quite specific, and I'm quickly running out of time.
On public safety, on this item I definitely asked some questions during development of the mandate that I put to Cabinet and want to speak to those a little bit and just want to note that there is a strong connection between public safety and addressing -- and the items that we have in addressing the effects of trauma and access to health care that I think I would like to have seen us create some better connections between. And that is just to say, quite simply, most of the social problems that we are facing in the Northwest Territories are not problems that we can police our way out of. And scientifically, and behind -- research behind these topics has shown time and time again that you can't police your way out of social issues. The way out of social issues is poverty reduction, treating addictions, mental health, wellness, ensuring that there's -- that everybody has equal ability to participate in the economy. That's what truly helps societies get over social ills. It's not something that you can just take people and put them in jail and expect that the problems are going to go away.
So I've got 20 seconds left. I had a bit of a comment that I wanted to make but I guess I'll have to include that in either tomorrow's or in a reply to the Budget Address. So I'll leave my comments at that. Thank you, Madam Chair.