Thank you. I’d like to also welcome everyone back into the House for the final sitting of the 19th Assembly. I also want to welcome back the residents of Yellowknife as well as those who were displaced for so long in the South Slave. I am very proud of the strength and resiliency of the residents of the NWT, of how people took care of each other. My social media feeds were full of people pitching in, sharing information, and providing resources to those less fortunate. It was truly heartwarming.
I also want to thank the hardworking fire, military, and safety personnel from the NWT and Alberta, and across Canada and the globe. They worked tirelessly and at great peril to protect our communities and keep people safe, and we owe them a huge thank you.
Mr. Speaker, as we entered the 2023 fire season, SCEDE had been working on Bill 74, the Forest Act. In the spring we traveled to several communities and received input from stakeholders and interested parties. This work confirmed for me that the NWT is woefully unprepared for climatedriven emergencies. From an outofdate 2018 emergency plan to putting the onus on underfunded communities to take care of their own preparedness, mitigation, and response, the NWT is poised to face costly climate disaster after climate disaster for the foreseeable future. We must be proactive now and create community specific mitigation and response plans that incorporate Indigenous science and local knowledge to properly care for the land.
Mr. Speaker, why have we not seen an updated Emergency Response Plan during this Assembly, one that accounts for our rapidly changing climate? Emergency Response Plans should be considered living documents with annual updates and training. Has any of this happened or is the last time anyone looked at the plan in 2018?
In 2021, the Minister of ENR and I traveled to the UN climate conference in Glasgow where he had one goal. His job was to impress upon the federal government that the NWT was experiencing climate change at an unprecedented rate; to make the Liberal government understand that we could not afford to pay for their climate change election promises, nor did we have the capacity to do so. Considering the controversial tax imposed on us all in the spring, it's clear that this mission was a failure. And I am very concerned that if the GNWT does not get serious now and proactively address climate change and emergency response in the coming months, we are going to find ourselves in the same situation next summer. And Mr. Speaker, I can't think of anything worse for the mental wellbeing of our people if that was to happen. Thank you.
Thank you, Member for Great Slave. Members' statements. Member for Monfwi.
