Mr. Speaker, this is a budget session, and I want to talk about the budget information that was tabled in this House yesterday.
Mr. Speaker, we talk about our unique style of consensus government, and there is an anomaly in that system. As soon as we choose the seven from among us, they are assigned areas of responsibility on behalf of MLAs and the residents of the Northwest Territories.
But at some point, they become the equivalent of a minority government and take on the characteristics of a governing political party, complete with party discipline, solidarity, confidentiality. They clearly differentiate themselves from those on this side of the House. Maybe this is an anomaly within consensus government that we need to rethink.
After the lack of consultation and representative participation in the development of this budget, maybe there’s a more fitting model that will encourage Ministers to embrace and return to their commitments to work with all Members. Perhaps, like municipal councils, we should just strike committees and elect chairpersons to oversee those committees, and have Members serve as liaisons with various sectors of our territory. Perhaps responsibility for chairing these areas of responsibility should be rotated from time to time to build capacity, to plan for succession in future governments and to give everyone a chance to understand thoroughly the different dynamics and challenges of governing this vast territory.
There has been a very distinctive reluctance on the part of this government to demonstrate the values of the politics of inclusion. The Regular Members of this House have an amazing array of knowledge, background, experience and skills that are being disregarded when this Cabinet fails to consult in a meaningful way.
After our strategic planning session when we developed our Northerners Working Together — a bit of a contradiction…. When we developed that document, Cabinet committees were struck to deal with refocusing government. Many other initiatives committees were struck. Regular Members asked to have representation on those committees, and we were denied. Federal funding in the form of the Building Canada Fund, the equal trust and municipal debt development fund and community trust funding have had projects identified with no input from the Regular Members at the front end. We haven’t been allowed to sit at the table. Decisions were made about reduction targets, job reductions. All this was done in consultation with deputy ministers and departments. Regular Members were lucky to hear about them after the fact and sometimes after the communication was already in the public — if not formally, at least informally.
Now the Finance Minister has brought forward a budget and can’t understand why Regular Members are having a hard time to buy in. There may be more to be said.
Mr. Speaker, I’d like to seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
Unanimous consent granted.
There may be more to be said about what’s not in this budget than there is to say about what is in it. Some of the Budget Address could have been well spent explaining the rationale for the cuts and job reductions so that Northerners could understand the big picture. What we heard were vague metaphors, analogies and hard-to-understand riddles. If we can’t understand the communication on this side of the House, how is the public supposed to make sense of it?
Speaking of the big picture, that is something this budget missed all together.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Member for Frame Lake, Ms. Bisaro.
