Mr. Speaker, it's been a long wait to receive the after-action review of the 2023 wildfire season and the government's response. If I can paraphrase much of the response, it was 'well, those are nice suggestions but now we have to start a whole new consultation process with all the Indigenous leaders and set up multiple working groups before we can commit to holding ourselves accountable through new legislation or regulation'.
We just had a year and a half of extensive consultation with leaders and residents in all the affected communities, including confidential interviews with staff who worked on the front lines of the evacuation, of the evacuations, and this was led by independent experts who most northern residents would trust more than they trust politicians or civil servants to guide us in emergencies. The idea of starting all over again in closed-door consultations amongst political leaders feels like a delay tactic and a way to avoid establishing enforceable standards and accountability.
Throughout its official response, the government describes MACA's role as primarily to provide communities with templates, workshops, information, as if the only thing preventing local communities from effectively managing emergencies is just not knowing which template or website to read. It's not enough to say, local communities, you're in charge of communities, and if you find you're in over your head in the middle of a crisis, just call us then. We need the GNWT to take responsibility beforehand for the big and expensive challenges around evacuations and the mass provision of emergency social services that no community could ever handle on its own. The GNWT needs to plan ahead how it will arrange, for example, the series of airlifts or how a group of vulnerable people will be housed and cared for in a host community.
I understand it is likely not feasible to hire a bunch of new people to set up a brandnew emergency management agency. What is critically needed, though, is some kind of trusted, independent governance mechanism during emergencies, a chain of command that leads somewhere other than the MACA Minister to ensure that decisions are being made by trusted experts rather than a particular politician that happened to get the MACA file. We have to get serious now, Mr. Speaker, not after several more years of consultations about setting hiring standards and clear duties for decision-makers rather than vague assurances. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member from Frame Lake.
