Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today I'd like to reflect on what makes the NWT different from other parts of Canada in ways that are both maddening and also beautiful. Even looking to our neighbour territories, each has a more unified sense of identity either because there's a common Indigenous government or the population's concentrated in a capital region. But the NWT has a collection of 33 communities, and it often seems that each one wants to go its own separate way, find its own unique solution, and even sometimes groups divided up within communities want different things.

I think the instinct behind that attitude is, Don't tell us what to do. We don't fit into the mold, and we don't want to follow the rules that are imposed upon us by anyone whether that person is in Ottawa or Yellowknife or in a regional centre. That attitude sometimes blocks us from working together, finding common purpose, and actually accomplishing anything, and that's the maddening part. But I also have to say, Mr. Speaker, that that very thing is a big part of why I live here and why I could never live anywhere else.

Many of us have chosen this place as or adopted home precisely because we found a place with more freedom from the kinds of rules and constraints that we would have found down south. It's somewhere to spread your wings, do things your own way, go ahead and take the initiative instead of waiting for the instructions or the protocols to be established. There is so many beautiful and also practical things that can be created from this urge to colour outside the lines and step outside the box.

There's constant tension in the NWT between people's urge for uniqueness and their desire for standards, between the need for fairness and rules, and also everyone's desire to be the exception to that rule, between the need for strength in numbers and the need for people to have their own unique voice. Mr. Speaker, this government is caught in those dilemmas, and I don't know a clear way out, but I have a few suggestions.

We need to let go of this dream of creating one set of instructions that all communities are supposed to follow in order to achieve standardized results. It's just never going to work. Instead of starting with the instructions, we need to start by looking at what's actually working in communities never mind how haphazardly they got there. Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker and to my colleagues. We need to stop punishing public servants for trying to step outside their silos and boxes, and we need to stop thinking of decentralization as simply taking this one set of instructions and delivering those from a regional centre instead of from Yellowknife. I believe we can find a way forward, Mr. Speaker, and I look forward to us working through it. Thank you.