Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, earlier this week, I spoke to this government's difficulties advantaging bills in a timely manner which fall under our Intergovernmental Council protocol. I want to emphasize this is not the only area we struggle on legislative timelines or responsiveness, and I have a few theories as to why this is. One is what we are repeatedly being told by Cabinet which is that our government has limited capacity to draft or move legislation forward. I think we need to look further into that aspect of this issue and consider the significance of it to my next point, which is our government's apparent difficulty responding to emerging or specific issues. In this area, it's a bit of a mixed bag.

With Bill 15, our Assembly demonstrated an ability to act so quickly on an emerging issue that we passed a bill through all its stages in a matter of weeks. But on other issues raised by the public or MLAs, they have not been met with openness or responsiveness. In the follow-up to delivering our report on Bill 29, I spoke with firefighters who mentioned that they had been liaising with the WSCC and advocating for changes to bring the NWT in line with other jurisdictions on presumptive coverage for seven years prior to a Private Member's bill finally coming forward, not a government bill.

During review of Bill 26, another Private Member's bill, nurses presenting to committees cited decades of advocacy on the issue of establishing a labour relations board, which has only this year, in response to the pressure created by Bill 26, been proposed by the government to finally be resolved through legislation.

Mr. Speaker, there is a place for Private Member's bills when addressing very specific amendments or minor changes, but Private Member's bills are limited in their ability to address complex legislative change, issues which require a lot of input and expertise, or coordination with other jurisdictions. Furthermore, what does it say about the effectiveness of government if we have to increasingly rely on Private Member's bills to advance issues of public interest?

We have a unique form of government, and I think one of the arguable drawbacks of consensus is the government doesn't have as strong of an incentive structure to respond to public pressure. For that reason, I think we need to think more about how GNWT can improve its responsiveness as part of our ongoing cultural shift towards service orientation. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.