Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ve been following with interest the Premier’s search for a vision over this summer, a summer which now unfortunately is long gone. It’s been hard not to notice the search. I see the ads every week and sometimes twice a week. The action that our Premier has taken trying to find out what NWT residents want, that action is admirable. Indeed, this Assembly, the residents of this Territory, need to know what we see for ourselves 20 to 30 years in the future.
The Premier wants the NWT to come together, to find a common goal, a vision for the future of the NWT. I struggle to understand how this Creating Our Future Together exercise will achieve such a goal. I don’t think the right questions are being asked, nor are they being asked in the right forum. What percentage of our residents is involved in these forums? I suspect it’s a small number.
The timing seems off. It is more than a little late in the game to be doing a visioning exercise, in my view. Shouldn’t we have started on this process three years ago, not three or four months ago? Don’t get me wrong, colleagues, I am a firm believer and supporter of strategic planning. For me the success for the NWT and its residents will be achieved only if we can focus on seeing, remembering, and acting on what I call the big picture. That success is the Premier’s goal, but I’m sceptical that it can be achieved within the current process.
I’ve been through almost all of the forum summaries and in those reports I saw expression of some common ideas from participants, but in general participants’ responses, although extremely valid, were diverse, quite specific, and all over the map.
How can five or more forum summaries, each anywhere from 10 to 25 pages in length, be combined and synthesized into an NWT vision? Will it be done by the Premier? Will it be done by his staff? By department staff? Given the time frame identified for this exercise, it’s unlikely that participants -- NWT residents -- will have a hand in the collating of these ideas into a vision. That’s a shame. For residents’ voices to be heard and to be perceived as having been heard, the final report cannot be left to GNWT personnel, it must be developed in conjunction with the participants.
Finally, I will have some of these questions for the Premier at the appropriate time and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Abernethy.
