Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The GNWT is now the proud owner of a fleet of marine transportation vessels. As I spoke of earlier in my statement, they're named after people who aren't necessarily reflective of the entire Northwest Territories. My one question to the Premier is: would you be onboard with helping solicit stories from the communities and nominations of names so that we can rename these vessels to better reflect the entirety of the Northwest Territories? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Honourable Premier.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The renaming of MTS vessels to better reflect the Northwest Territories' long history of marine shipping is a very good idea, worth pursuing; however, we have to be respectful of some of the existing names on existing vessels and the reasons behind them. Also, we have to confirm what vessels we will be keeping in the long term, and would only consider renaming vessels in our core fleet.
I have since directed staff of Executive and Indigenous Affairs and Infrastructure to start drafting some guidelines about naming and a process for soliciting nominations. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I understand there are a lot of technical issues, they don't know what ships they're keeping yet and all that kind of stuff, but it's great to hear that the Premier is moving forward with a way to solicit nominations, and I'll be letting my constituents know to start getting their stories ready. Does the Premier have a timeline of when we can expect either this process to begin or the names to change?
We will be developing a process for renaming these vessels and will bring forward proposed names for the Executive Council's consideration.
There are some other considerations; for example, in the guidelines for naming of government buildings, we require that it not be named after living persons and other considerations, so those kinds of things have to be developed. I expect that, in the very near future, probably within a couple of months, we would be able to develop a process.
Since this is the government's first foray into naming vessels, I hope that they look at different ways of doing it and don't just transfer the rules from naming buildings to vessels. I know that in Hay River, for example, we have a family, the Loutits, where they have son, father, grandfather; they're all legendary river pilots, so to have an SS Loutit would be to name after it after a family, so it would be a little different. I think we should be open to that. Will the government look at being open to different ways of naming and not just transferring the system from buildings to the marine vessels?
We're very open to looking at different ways, as long as we stick to the original intention of naming vessels to help recognize the long history of marine shipping.
One name that comes to mind when I look in the United Kingdom or in England where they had a competition to name a sea-going vessel and they came up with a name like Boaty McBoatface, or something like that. I think we want to make sure we have a process that we come up with names that recognize the long marine history in the Northwest Territories.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Mackenzie Delta.
