Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to return to the subject of disclosure of public sector salaries. The many jurisdictions I have talked about in this House do publish their public service salaries, and believe it or not, as of last Friday the Mackenzie Valley Review Board has finally stepped up to the plate to show some leadership in this territory by publicizing what they pay their chair and their board members. It’s true, public disclosure is what the public wants to find out where their money is going.
As I’ve previously stated, provinces like New Brunswick publicize their salary ranges, Nova Scotia publicizes their salary ranges, Ontario does it and even Ontario puts it on a website that’s easily accessible by all their citizens. Even anyone from the Northwest Territories can click away.
Manitoba has the courage to be honest with their citizens and even British Columbia goes out of their way and says this is what’s important to do, but in the Northwest Territories we hide behind, saying, oh my goodness, it’s confidential. In those salary disclosures, a lot of times they spell out the employee, the position, the location that they work, so are they assuming people in those six provinces out of 10 cannot read and wouldn’t understand that information? Are they assuming people don’t care where their tax dollars go? Are they assuming wrongly? I think so.
It’s time this territorial government starts to follow the lead of what the Mackenzie Valley Review Board has just done. It may not be perfect, but my goodness, it is a true step in accountability of where the public’s money is going. Now, of course, they spent a lot of money on honoraria, but that’s not the point. The point is people know where their money’s going and let them be the judge individually if they feel it appropriately spent.
As I had said, and continue to say, six out of 10 provinces do this. It’s time to stop hiding behind mercurial defences as to why we can’t do something. It’s time to find a way to say how we can do it and achieve this accountability. We will not be able to pry this out of the Ministers because they’ll say, oh, we cannot do that, but I believe last session I tabled an experience, if not a crystal clear example, of the Government of the Northwest Territories tabling or publicizing in the Northern News Services, a few years ago, employee salaries. I think that the amount that I tabled was almost seven pages of facts and figures.
In short, I will be coming back to the Minister of Human Resources to talk about how we can show some leadership on this and shed some light finally, once and for all.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
