Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I don't think there's much disagreement in this room about the problem that is trying to be solved through implementation of this new policy. In fact, I haven't heard any disagreement about that, the problem of underrepresentation of Indigenous persons in the public service.

So to give a little bit of history on this, the department during the last term of the Assembly went out and did engagement with the public on changing the affirmative action policy and fixing the issues that are at hand. What came back was quite complex. It produced a lot of results with a number of different recommendations. And I would say that there was not a clear path identified which put the department in a difficult position. And I would note that much of what was said in that engagement was spoken to by the Member for Yellowknife North just now.

The various challenges that Indigenous persons and persons with disabilities, people in minority groups, face in terms of the barriers to their advancement within the government, to their entry into the workforce, education outcomes, which the Member for Monfwi has spoken eloquently about and I agree with completely -- and I have more to say about education outcomes in a different item that we're considering today -- and so the department was faced with something difficult. How do we get at this issue? And they brought forward what we saw as the first iteration of the Indigenous employment policy. And so committee responded to that, wrote to the Minister. It ended up as was pointed out by other members -- wrote to the minister multiple times. First sort of critiquing the initial attempt and saying we wanted to engage further and consider other options. And one of the things that committee pointed out, that I'm going to speak to a bit further in a second here, is that the new Indigenous employment policy as presented addressed three out of the 17, 17 recommendations, that came out of the What We Heard report of the department's engagement on this issue. And so there -- even with this new policy are a huge number of gaps that still need to be filled. Again, the Member for Yellowknife North spoke well to those gaps, and so I don't want to stand here and repeat those.

And so the other thing that committee did is that, you know, with the department, ultimately we got -- we came to a place where committee wrote the Minister asking -- asking her to pause this process and say, you know, we need to do more work on this. And the committee also went out to the public and said now that the policy's out, what do you think. And committee received a significant number of responses, far more than we usually do. We received 50 written responses from the public raising a number of different issues, raising issues with the way the policy was being implemented, concerns about it, but in particular, noting again, the gaps in education, the gaps that are not being filled with this policy and all the different elements that lead to barriers to advancement and barriers to entry into jobs with the government. And so my main takeaway right now is that there is still a lot of work left to be done. And I would note that when the Minister came before committee just the other day, staff acknowledged that fact, acknowledged that there's a lot of work to do, acknowledged that when it comes to diversity and inclusion, all the groups that have been left out of the new policy, there's a lot of work left to be done.

And so what I've come away with from this process is just I don't really understand why this had to be rushed, why it had to be done now, considering that this is a policy that's 30 years old, it's taken a long time for us to get here, and why the Minister couldn't take more time to work with committee, help build consensus around a new policy and a set of actions and changes that we can all agree on that comprehensively get at the various issue that is came up during engagement. And I think that's why we're having so much difficulty with this now, is that this policy as it stands alone doesn't solve all those problems.

And I want to acknowledge that there was some concession by the Minister. The Minister did change the policy to recognize that the real goal here, the real outcome that we're looking for is increased employment of Northerners, Indigenous Northerners in particular, from the territory or from groups represented in the territory if they didn't necessarily grow up here. And I don't disagree with that. I think it's a -- I think it's a good goal, and I think most people do. But where I do have concerns is all the folks who are left out and the 14 other recommendations that haven't been addressed by this particular policy.

Now, the Minister has ensured us, and the Minister's staff has ensured us, that work is ongoing on that and I appreciate that but, again, I still just don't understand why we couldn't bring forward something more wholistic that acknowledges all these issues, particularly the one that I think, you know, was highlighted by the -- sorry, Mr. Speaker. The name is -- but something that's been highlighted is the enormous education gap between Indigenous youth and non-Indigenous youth in this territory and the fact that education outcomes are so different. I think that that is one of the key issues. We have got to get at that. And I certainly hope that that becomes one of the next big priorities of the Assembly, is addressing that issue head on.

So that's really where I'm left here. And as chair of the committee that wrote to the Minister multiple times, I would just say, you know, I'm standing in support of this motion today in good faith with Cabinet in the sense that what I'm really trying to say here is we wanted to work with Cabinet on developing a more fulsome solution. We wrote to Cabinet and asked to do that and were not met with -- with that willingness.

Now, I want to acknowledge a few things. The Minister has reached out to committee and suggested we form a working group and that we work on this issue on a go-forward basis. I appreciate that and certainly look forward to doing that work. The other thing I wanted to know is, you know, some of the questions that I asked yesterday in had the house were about how this is going to affect students. And I would just note that I think it'll bring some of my constituents a fair bit of comfort knowing that students that go away and have been educated in the territory and go off to university still come -- will still be able to receive a form of preference hiring when they apply for the jobs in the Northwest Territories. And those are folks that I'm concerned about, people who are just entering their careers. So I appreciate that reassurance from the Minister. And, you know, I look forward in whichever way this goes down -- I look forward to working with the Minister further on this issue. We are certainly not done. There's a lot more work to be done as was highlighted by the Member for Yellowknife North, by Member for Monfwi, by all the Members who have spoken, that there's a lot more work to do. So I look forward to doing that work. And, again, I just say in good faith I support this motion asking for a pause as I had done as chair of the committee writing just saying, you know, we need to take more time to do this, and I certainly respect the Members who have come around and support the policy in its current form. Either way, always look forward to working with my colleagues. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.