Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my questions today are for the Minister of Finance. Mr. Speaker, phase 1 of government renewal was intended to do an inventory of GNWT programs while phase 2 was meant to look at how those programs are funded. Can the Minister start off today by informing this House of the current status on government renewal? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Kam Lake. Minister responsible for Finance.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to say that all of the phase 1 work, including up to and including the Northwest Territories Health and Social Services Authority, have all had their inventories completed as of July of this year. That was the last group to make their way through. That work is all done now. And phase 2 is also well underway.
Since November of last year, we kicked off with Housing Northwest Territories, Department of Finance, and Department of Education, Culture and Employment. They are the first ones to see themselves having their programs select programs going through the evaluation stage of the GRI. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I guess my next question, then, would be when do Members on this side get to kind of see the fruits of the labour, so to speak, of the GNWT with in regards to phase 2? What is the expected timeline that they are working towards? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I know we've been sending over updates along the way as the work has progressed. I'm happy to send another one before the end of the life of this Assembly so that all Members are well aware of where it's at. And, certainly, it's also part of our own business planning processes that we are continuing to report on where this work is at. And so all of those all of those tools can be used but, as I've said, happy to give one more further update to Members of this House and this Legislative Assembly. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you to the Minister for that commitment. Mr. Speaker, my next question is for government renewal to really be effective, it cannot happen in silos. How is the GNWT working to ensure that now that they're at the phase 2 of this review that this review really is done with a crossdepartmental lens? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, that is really one of the core elements of government renewal and the shift in thinking around this is that every department has to be thinking about its evaluative process. We have, Mr. Speaker, when government renewal was coming out, we put in place a requirement of program evaluation policy requiring that any programs over $2 million, we need to have a logic model and performance tracking indicators. Mr. Speaker, a lot of programs did not. A lot of departments struggled with that. The majority of the capacity for evaluation resides in the Department of Finance. So having the GRI now underway creates that crossdepartmental work so that this is happening, that departments can access these resources, that they can bring forward their needs and their programs to have logic models, performance tracking, so we can actually have evidencebased programs and evidencebased decisionmaking about those programs. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary. Member for Kam Lake.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's a lot riding on government renewal as far as fiscal sustainability is concerned. You can look through Hansard and find numerous occasions where the response in regards to deficits or concerns about spending where Ministers have responded well, we're doing government renewal, we're partaking in government renewal. So we're really relying on this exercise here. So I'm wondering if the Minister can speak to how the GNWT intends to measure the success of this government renewal exercise? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'd go back to looking at, really, the purpose of government renewal short term, gathering information and evidence. We do like to talk about having datadriven decisions, about having evidencebased decisionmaking. You can't do that without the data, and you can't do it without the evidence. We had to get that in place, and it has taken quite some time, Mr. Speaker, because we are doing it over the entire Government of the Northwest Territories in a way that has never been done before.
Mr. Speaker, along the way, we found there was over 200 different programs that didn't have evaluation metrics in place. It was important to know that. It's important to understand that that alone, in my view, Mr. Speaker, is a success of this program. But over the long term there needs to be, of course, a really corporatewide, governmentwide, approach to evaluation to employ program evaluation policy, to have the tools ready, to know where to go within the system to do those kinds of evaluations so that so that we the traction around and the culture change for evaluation and datadriven decisionmaking only solidifies further. We have a tremendous foundation here, Mr. Speaker, and that is the success but as it goes forward, it will continue to be measured by the programs that get evaluated. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Nunakput.
