Thank you, Mr. Speaker, I would like to join in my colleagues and thanking all of our forestry firefighters, all of those who worked at our pilots, our tanker bases, in those logistics, to the hundreds of volunteers in multiple communities, especially here in Yellowknife who stayed behind and built what is truly an impressive fire break in a matter of days as well as all of the municipal staff. And lastly, Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank all of our constituents who have been through a lot, and it seems like the majority of time in this Assembly has been spent in some sort of state of emergency, and it feels like we just can't get a rest. I know a lot of us are feeling like little stress, and I encourage everyone, you know, to try and take some time now to recover and hopefully we get a little break from this never-ending string of emergencies.
But Mr. Speaker, that may not be the case, and I want to echo the sentiment of some of my colleagues that we have to take this after-action review seriously. We have to work with our municipalities, and I think that we have to answer some fundamental questions, one is on fire management. Are we spending enough on fire prevention or are communities properly funded to build fire breaks? Are we doing enough control burning now that cooler weather is with us? Emergency management, can we really continue to have our communities be the lead on emergency management?
Here in Yellowknife, it was very clear that the City of Yellowknife was never resourced and funded to do air evacuation or to evacuate a whole city, let alone provide accommodations across multiple jurisdictions. We stepped that up and did that, but it raises fundamental questions about where that responsibility should lie in the first place.
I think there are lots of questions about our forest management practices going forward. Certainly we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on suppression, and we are experts in that front. But there are questions about how large fire breaks need to be built around communities. Communities, two of them, we had the opportunity to tragically to see the one in Enterprise just before the community was burnt, Mr. Speaker, and they were proud of the size of that. But was there any size of fire break that would have prevented that fire or would control burning have done that? I don't have these answers. They are technical questions, but I think this is the entire scope of an after-action review that we owe our citizens and I think needs public input from the public and all the community and all of the people involved in this so we can answer some of these questions and we don't find ourselves fighting over jurisdiction in the midst of an emergency again. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member for Nahendeh.
