R.J. Simpson

Thank you, Madam Chair. And so this will come to Cabinet and, you know, the way the Member described everything coming onto Cabinet like a tsunami, that's just Cabinet. That's how every meeting is essentially. We get a thousand pages in front of us with major decisions that we need to deal with. So this will come to Cabinet but the implementation of it is not going to be, you know, March 1st of -- or sorry, April 1st of, you know, 2028. There is going to have to be a phased approach. The healthcare system needs to continue to function as a healthcare system, so we want to make sure that it...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Maybe I will just go right to the deputy minister for this one. Thanks.

Thank you. So, I mean, the principles and interests, again, we create these at the beginning of a term. I am not confident that we even need to review them. There's been other things that have overtaken that with tasks that staff have been busy with. And so, you know, after this I will go back and I will have a discussion, do we need to have this in there anymore? Because it doesn't seem to be the holdup. There's other issues that are preventing tables from moving forward, and I haven't pinpointed them, the principles and interests as the holdup there. So the goal is to settle claims. I don't...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will start with the LNG piece. And I've been vocal about the moratorium in the Beaufort Delta and -- or in the Arctic Ocean as well as the potential for LNG in the Beaufort Delta, and so I wanted to make sure that the position I was taking wasn't at odds with the new leadership at IRC. And I won't speak for IRC on their position on that, but I wanted to make sure that that conversation was had right off the bat so going forward, I am not saying anything out of turn. We also spoke about the MOU between our two governments. So we have MOUs with a number of different...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So the idea is really for a comprehensive look at some of these areas that will then be presented to Cabinet to make decisions. So it's not so much an iterative, here's some information, you should go and fix this. It's going to be a -- I would say a bigger initiative than that. There's a lot going on in the healthcare system and, you know, which is why we have the unit, because the healthcare system is too busy to do these -- to look into these kinds of things, essentially, and so I don't want to pepper them with, you know, try and make this change, make this change...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, lots. I will go to the deputy minister through you, Madam Chair, for some more detail on that. Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don't know if I would even venture to take a guess because no one knows when it comes to the land claims. When you have multiple parties involved -- so it's not just us. There's also Canada. And Canada still has some issues that they need to figure out. They need to provide clarity in certain areas, and I think the other partners have been waiting for years for clarity on some of these areas. And so it's tough to get to the end goal when we don't even quite know what path all of us can take together. So there's still some work to be done there.

That being said, even in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I have. I am familiar -- I know Chair Elias from my previous role as education, culture and employment Minister when we were working on the school in his community, and so I made a number of trips up there and have had many conversations with him over the phone and in his house, so we're very familiar with each other. So when he was elected, I reached out to him that night, congratulated him, and I've been giving him a bit of space because I know how much information there is to absorb right at the beginning of that term. But we did reach out, requested a meeting...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think that my hope -- and, again, there's a lot of work to be done here. I've seen the very first analysis so far. We're part of it. And just from what I've seen, there is money to be saved while still continuing to deliver the service. And so I don't think that we have a plethora of different programs that we can just cut and get rid of. In the North, we have to over-capitalize. We have to provide services even when there's a small number of people who need those services because that's what governments do. And so we're going to continue to do those. But within those...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So, first, I will say if Members are aware of any duplication where we have two government departments doing the same job, please let us know. Those are the kind of efficiencies I'd be happy to find and get rid of. If there's a complete duplication, we don't need that.

In terms of the amalgamation, I am not looking at any amalgamations or dissolving any departments this term. That would have to be a decision for the next Assembly. As I've said before, I've seen that a couple of times now, and there is a lot going on, there's a lot to do, and that would take a lot of our...