Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There's a quote I saw online recently that I can unfortunately not attribute but it doesn't diminish its truth. Quote, "The role of a politician is not to get into power. The role of a politician is to act as a steward and caretaker for our society, to manage society for the betterment of all of us."
That quote sums up why I am here today. I want to help provide the direction that leads to the betterment of all of us in the NWT. But the job of governing "better" seemingly gets harder by the day, week, year, and decade. Some of it simply is that all the problems feel like too much. Disasters and catastrophes, both of nature and those driven by people and their desire for power, feel amplified more and more in this century.
As a millennial, I can confidently say that my generation is bone-tired of living through unprecedented situations. To us, unprecedented doesn't really mean anything anymore. It's just another Tuesday. And so many days feel like just going through the motions to find enough money to scrape together for housing, food, and basic needs. But, Mr. Speaker, despite it all, or perhaps even because of it, I have hope. I'm here to try and lead with my heart and compassion, balanced with evidence-based decision-making. I'm here to remind the government of its core mission: To always focus on lifting up the people of the Northwest Territories by choosing programs and policies that make sense, by responding effectively to what people tell government that they need, and not acting simply in lip service.
I'm here to listen to my colleagues, especially those with lived experiences different than mine, and understand the hardships that their constituents face across the territory.
I do believe that everyone in this room, on both sides of the floor, would agree with the key tenet of leading with compassion. I think that intent was clear when we collectively set out priorities of the 20th Assembly that focused on fundamental human needs. The 19 elected representatives in this room could all agree on:
- Sustainability,
- Accessibility and affordability of housing,
- A strong economic foundation,
- Access to health care and addressing the effects of trauma, and
- Safe residents and communities.
But I'd argue that right now the roadmap getting us from today to the Premier's vision of the NWT 50 years from now is a bit tenuous.
As a first-time MLA but a long-time political nerd, I understand how the pieces of the nesting doll- the priorities, the mandate, the business plan, and the budget - fit together to create the agenda for each government. But when I look at our first efforts to create an agenda of our own by passing our shared priorities through this process, it starts to look like we're playing a game of telephone. Rather than translating our priorities into a plan that will create meaningful results for our NWT residents, we have produced a largely status quo budget.
While this is disappointing, I recognize that this is partly a function of how the puzzle pieces come together to create the plan. It's hard to be nimble and quick in our system of governance, and I'm prepared to give the Premier and Cabinet the benefit of the doubt as we go through the current budget debate.
I can understand why this budget is status quo, Mr. Speaker. The increasing pressures on government spending and growing debt are discouraging constraints that have to inform and influence the plans that we're making. But I'm still frustrated by the lack of substance behind the promise to do better in the three and half short years that we have left together. So I'm going to speak mainly in broad strokes, Mr. Speaker. It's imperative from my perspective that the budgets of the 20th Assembly need to both meet our challenges in the here and now but also align with the needs of the future. I think we may have started down the right path from a debt perspective but perhaps not as fully in other ways. I will always ask Cabinet to impress upon the GNWT to consider paths forward that are proactive instead of reactive.
One such proactive concept, the Government Renewal Initiative, or GRI, began as an exciting concept. In 2020, the Minister of Finance said, "The Department of Finance is planning to shift the way our budget is developed. The Government Renewal Initiative will rely on value-driven budgeting principles to review GNWT programs and services, department by department, and allocate resources to areas that are most critical and valuable to residents.
Value-based budgeting, also known as priority-based budgeting, is both the idea that underlies the building of the budget as well as the method. It's founded on the commonsense idea that government financial resources should be allocated based on how effectively programs and services give value to residents.
We now hear from the Department of Finance that GRI is shifting its focus to evaluation since program inventories for the GNWT are complete. This is fine as an evolutionary growth in the initiative, but it concerns me deeply as the GNWT's internal capacity for formal evaluation is limited.
A truly robust program evaluation takes, on average, about 12 to 18 months. How many hundreds of people years are we behind in knowing what programs are effective and a good use of our dollars? While we lag behind on knowing the true value of many of our investments in programs and services, I'm concerned that we aren't making the best decisions of what is truly the fat that can be cut. Instead, we're told vacant positions might be a solution but feedback from constituents has shown that isn't necessarily the case. In turn, leading to frustration and rallies outside of this House, as recently as last week. I commend the Minister of Finance for going to the public service to ask for commonsense solutions to bringing budgets in check with the realities of what we have to spend. $1800 suggestions is a fantastic start, Mr. Speaker.
I fully believe that many more cost savings can be found that do not cut positions or impede or cut programs and services that residents rely on. At the same time, we need to make sure that we do not fall into the trap of making cost savings the primary measure of this Assembly's success. Fiscal sustainability certainly matters but it is a measure of administrative success, of an organization's ability to use its funds efficiently. If we want to be successful as an Assembly, we need to do much more than simply use our resources efficiently. We need to use our resources to produce meaningful results for the people of the NWT.
Financial debt is not the only debt the government should be thinking about. We should also be thinking about debts in education, shelter, and health and wellness, that often don't get measured simply because they do not show up clearly in the main estimates. It is these human debts that NWT residents experience directly in their lives and which this Assembly should be addressing as its primary focus. To do this, we need to have a fundamentally different discussion about how we allocate and use the government's financial resources.
The challenges NWT residents need us to address are persistent and longstanding. Making meaningful progress on them may well require an extraordinary and potentially inefficient investment that we need to be prepared to talk about. We also need to be prepared to consider whether or not the current distribution of resources among departments is truly contributing to achieve those results or is simply maintaining the administrative status quo.
I believe that this kind of fundamental shift in how government resources are allocated is the true promise of GRI, but we aren't there quite yet. Finding administrative efficiencies and cost savings is a step in the right direction, but we can't stop there. We need to have the collective political courage to put our convictions and principles into action by fundamentally altering the way future budgets get made and government resources get allocated. I recognize this work will take time, and I'm willing to wait until next year's budget to see this initiative bear fruit.
It's imperative to align budgets with the challenges of the future. I hope that everyone here today can now fully embrace the fact that climate change is the existential threat of our lifetime and being well prepared means doing business differently in so many ways. It's a monumental task to shift the culture of government from reactive to proactive, Mr. Speaker. For my part, I am going to do my best to learn what I can about change management in my time as a Member.
I also appreciate that Cabinet has hard decisions to make every day to balance the wellness of our territory now to where it could be in five, ten, or fifty years from now. I ask for Cabinet to define their leadership by embracing and welcoming letting go of ways of doing things that no longer serve us. The conversations that I have had with this Cabinet give me a great deal of hope on this front.
We point to reconciliation a great deal throughout how we plan to move forward in partnership with Indigenous leadership, but I believe we need to look beyond to a future where we have decolonized government and truly work in partnership. The systems of government that we have were built by people, and we can deconstruct them and put them back together however we want. Nothing is stopping us except for our imaginations. The implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has to be much, much more encompassing than just a statement of consistency in our legislation going forward. I eagerly look forward to the action plan and the priorities for change set out by Indigenous governments and Indigenous organizations in partnership with the GNWT. I think this is an excellent opportunity for our public government to continue to work differently and better than we have before in all ways that we legislate and deliver services. That conversation excites and invigorates me, Mr. Speaker. This conversation is one I continue to ask for throughout our term, and I am certain the Premier will get tired of me buzzing in his ear, and that's okay.
When stakeholders from all backgrounds and points of advocacy ask us to pull in one direction, we must all put that into action. I genuinely hope that the Premier visits every riding and sees the inequity my colleagues from smaller communities speak to every day. I hope that he visits some of the rentals in my riding that showcase that there are stark differences in what Yellowknife looks like depending on what opportunities you have access to. I hope he sees firsthand the youth who struggle for purpose in systems that fail them, that he sees that artists who yearn to share their creations but have fleetingly few avenues to do so, that he sees the folks who want to be deeply rooted in their relationship with the land but can't afford the gas for their sled to go harvest. Perhaps we can't solve everything all at once, but we can make meaningful changes in these three and half short years that inspire hope, Mr. Speaker.
I will not lose an opportunity to speak to the fact that in the four-year business plan, the GNWT has noted that the Residential Tenancies Act is up for review and possibly amendments in the life of this government. I was horrified to have the media reach out to me this past weekend to tell me that residents in my constituency had faced a 150 percent rent hike, Mr. Speaker, which is essentially a backdoor to eviction. We can't continue to allow things like this to happen to residents when it is very much in our power to change the law, Mr. Speaker. We can take decisive action and make life better for so many.
What good governance looks like for me and what it looks like for my fellow colleagues may be different in execution, but I genuinely believe that after getting to know my colleagues these past few months is that we are all asking for us not to forget those of our territory with the least. 70 percent of this territory had a collective trauma of evacuation, and the disparity of how that evacuation played out aligns all too closely with the disparity of income and opportunity for too many of us, Mr. Speaker. I really wish we would stop speaking about resiliency as if it is a compliment. We need to stop commending people for being resilient and instead redesign the systems that we operate in that make people suffer.
One final note, Mr. Speaker. During my campaign, I knocked on the door of an educator who works at the Kaw Tay Whee School in Dettah. She told me in no uncertain terms that her school kids will be coming for my job if I was elected, and I told her that was fantastic because it is. More than anything, I want to leave this House, the GNWT, and the territory better than I found it for those kids in Dettah who are coming for my job and will be governing sooner rather than later, Mr. Speaker. They deserve our best work today and every day until the end of our term in 2027. Thank you.
