Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I do, and I shall.
Mr. Speaker, thank you very much to the Members who spoke in support of the bill. You know, I do want to reflect as Members -- the bill, the motion. The motion; it's not a bill. Thank you for the correction. Not a full Point of Order but technically important.
So this all started -- Members have alluded to this, but one of the first substantive motions that we debated in this chamber of this Assembly was for a public inquiry, and the reason it is related to the motion is this report emerged from that. So we wouldn't have this report without that motion. And Members did speak to this directly.
Now, Mr. Speaker, if this was to replace a public process, I don't think it's done a good job. And we hear the concerns from Members, in particular Members from outside of regional centres. Mr. Speaker, I won't quote from the report again. Members have done that. It's very clear that the findings were significant.
And another concern I suppose I have over the course of this conversation in this chamber is publicly reported rationale for not accepting the recommendation was largely around fiscal capacity, the fact that it would be an offseason agency, that it's not really necessary because of those reasons. Today we're hearing a different story where it is we're doing it all already from the sounds of it. We have an EMO office. It does all the things that the recommendation made. But it does beg the question, as raised by the Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, if TSI knew this coming in, the structure hasn't drastically changed in two years. So the structure is not novel. The structure has not undergone major reform. There's been improvements. Absolutely, the Minister spoke to those improvements. But it's the underlying structure that was recommended for change. And that's what we're talking about here. You know, we're not saying progress hasn't been made. But we're saying progress on this fundamental recommendation, the skeleton of our entire system of how we manage emergencies, that's unaffected. And until that changes, until we deal with what you could call root causes of a lack of emergency preparedness, we will continue to experience them.
Mr. Speaker, governments in Canada are all moving towards dedicated public safety ministries and agencies. The Minister's list of where agencies work similarly to ours apparently, even though some of the best practiced standards are similar models, you know, there are departments of public safety, there are departments of justice in public safety. And emergency -- EMO management is part of those operations. So, again, if a ministry -- a ministry can do this work as well, and it's something that Northerners need, you know. It's something Northerners need. Not just wildfire management but public safety generally, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, one of the things I'm also concerned about, the report at large, is it speaks frequently to the need for a culture of safety throughout the government, not just in one office, but throughout the government, and numerous recommendations made, including recommendations around incident command management system training and usage are -- only speak to what's happening in the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs and not across the whole government. We'd like to have whole of government approaches, at least we like to talk about it. So if we're going to have a culture of safety and we need to do -- we need to have structural institutions of safety. That is what they're getting at when they're making these recommendations. It's not that we're not doing stuff; it's that we're not doing -- again, we're not changing the underlying culture of the GNWT as it relates to this important priority.
Mr. Speaker, okay, I think we've -- I sense that we should move on. We have other business to attend to. But, Mr. Speaker, I do also agree that I don't want to see a recommendation 120 days that says we already told you we weren't going to do it, we're not going to do it now. So this is very unusual. I've never done this before, but I'm going to urge the Members opposite who seek to abstain to vote against this because I'd rather have a vote against on the record if they're not going to respond to this in a meaningful way. Because that's the antithesis of what this motion is supposed to do. It's supposed to consider the clauses, evaluate them, and respond with an open mind, not a mind already made up. So if they're going to vote against, I encourage them to vote against it. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
