Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to my colleagues for dealing with my consistent leaky eyeballs.
Will the Premier acknowledge that the evacuation did not go right on many fronts as outlined in the after-action review and apologize to residents of the Northwest Territories? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Great Slave. Mr. Premier.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member spoke about the collective trauma that we all experienced. And I agree, that is something that as a territory we have to come to grips with. The other day I was thinking that, boy, this is the best time of year. It was, you know, early May, it was spring, and I just felt like a punch in the gut because the last few years, you know, they haven't been great. It's been a really tough time. And I acknowledge that. And, you know, to the Member's question about the evacuation, I want to note there was evacuations. There were 12 communities evacuated a total of 14 times. So this is not just a Yellowknife evacuation issue. This was an issue around the Northwest Territories. And obviously things did not go as -- there were many areas where things didn't go well. I've been saying that since I've stood up in this House and ran for Premier. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into this House and into this role is to address the deficiencies that I saw, that I experienced, during that evacuation. And so that is the work that began on day one when we formed government and with this after-action review, we are going to make sure that we are implementing the recommendations based on the review that we're doing of that report because we want to make sure that what we saw, the deficiencies that happened, don't happen again. And so, you know, this is something that happened in the past years ago, and I'm sorry to those residents who had, you know, terrible experiences. Many of us had bad experiences, Mr. Speaker. We're all coming to terms with it. You know, I was an evacuee. My colleague from Hay River was a first responder. And so, you know, we had completely different experiences. And there's unique experiences across the territory. Some people, it was no big deal for them. Other people, it was devastating for them, and I feel for them, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Premier for that. And please let it be known that I never meant to minimize the fact that there were multiple evacuations. I use evacuation as a singular as to cover the entire year and -- yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, will the Premier make a point that in the GNWT's response to the after-action review to also address that healing needs to occur in the public service to demonstrate that leadership supports them in tangible ways. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So I've gone over the recommendations in the review. In time, the GNWT will be putting forward a response. And I do recognize that healing needs to occur. There has been reach-out in the past from, you know, senior management to staff, but there needs to be ongoing support. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Final supplementary. Member from Great Slave.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And, yeah, I recognize that's a thorny issue. I'm just asking for some tangible ways that the Premier can address that and address specifically to the public service who feel kind of hollow with the responses thus far. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There's no easy fix to this situation. There's some people in the public service who are, you know, emotionally scarred from this. And I hear the stories from across the public service of the work that was done, you know, heroic efforts. You might not have been on the front lines; you might have been in an office; you might have been in a hotel room with three kids and two dogs. It doesn't mean your efforts weren't heroic. So I completely recognize that, and I appreciate the work done by the public service during an unprecedented time. It's clear that we were not prepared for a disaster on the scale of which we've never seen in the Northwest Territories. We don't have a standing army to respond to these things.
What we're doing now is we're taking steps to ensure that we don't put public servants in those positions again. We're making sure that people know what their roles are, that we can all work together in a coordinated fashion as government with community governments and with Indigenous governments to ensure that next time something like this happens, we will be better prepared and everyone will feel more supported. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Premier. Oral questions. Member from Yellowknife North.
