Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As this is Environment Week, I thought I would comment on an affront to Mother Nature, our environment and our pocketbooks perpetrated by our government every day. I had a perfect example of this yesterday. In my mailbox appeared a lovely 16page, full-colour, glossy report. The accompanying three-line letter told me the report was attached and that it was available on-line and provided the Internet URL.
The letter was a waste of paper, except that I will reuse the back side. The info in the letter could have been sent in an e-mail. The report was lovely to look at but won’t be used. I will read it, maybe file it, quite likely recycle it. I can get the same info, also in colour, by reading the report on-line.
What was the cost to print this document? How many trees did we kill to make it and the letterhead page for how many hundreds of people, and how many of these reports do you think will still be around next week?
All Members recently received an e-mail from a Yellowknife resident with a novel cost-saving suggestion. He said, and I quote from the e-mail:
“…the GNWT give serious consideration to changing the format for annual reports from hard copy to a disk. If the reports were prepared and submitted on a disk and distributed as such, the savings to the government and agencies would be substantial. The time spent by employees who are tasked to complete the reports would be reduced significantly, thereby saving time and money for the government. Following tabling in the Legislative Assembly, the reports could be uploaded to the department’s web page or to a central web page containing all the GNWT and agencies’ reports.
“On another note, this would greatly reduce waste (all the reports that eventually end up at the dump) to our landfills and cut greenhouse gases during the production stage.”
It’s small changes like this one that will help our environment. It is small changes like this one that will save us money and force us to think outside the box. I don’t know what policies the government might have in regard to the publication of reports — why, what, when, how — but I suggest that we need to change them and change them now.
To the government, save our trees and send notification of new reports and copies of the document by e-mail; save our expenses and print it to disk or post online. To quote again from the email, “It would be a win-win situation for everyone.” Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Members’ statements. The honourable Member for Inuvik Twin Lakes, Mr. McLeod.
