Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs has repeatedly referred to the importance of the Incident Command System when questioned on emergency management and public safety. The independent action report makes three separate ICS recommendations, but the GNWT has only fully agreed to implement one of those, for one of those recommendations to mandate and maintain ICS training for elected officials and emergency managers. The Minister is only making that training available to MLAs. Why isn't the Minister ensuring that that training is mandatory for all public officials in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.
Thank you, Member from Range Lake. Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The ICS training is the standard across Canada. That training is being provided to all -- sorry, offered to all communities who are interested in it to help with the community emergency plans and their preparedness. The public service has had many workshops to have their staff trained and have the ability to stand up staff for surge capacity. Also, I think it's important to remember that as elected officials and somebody who's been involved in emergencies in the past, we tend to want to get involved. And I think that's the important part of the mandatory ICS training for elected officials within the GNWT, is to clarify our roles and responsibilities during emergencies. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as our emergency management system is made up of volunteers and is ad hoc to emergencies as they arise, having everyone trained in ICS shouldn't be an offer, it should be a mandatory requirement. It's legislated in Alberta, the independent after-action report cites this as a best practice. Will the Minister legislate ICS in either regulations or in legislative amendments so we can ensure who is responsible for emergency management in the Northwest Territories is adequately trained in ICS. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Like anything else we do, I don't think any community would appreciate if the government went in there and told them that they have to get ICS training for their volunteers in their communities. We support the training, we support the community emergency plans, we support their EMO organizations to provide the training. Anybody within the GNWT who's involved in the EMO organization has the ICS training or will receive ICS training to support any emergencies for communities, local emergencies, well I’m going to start by saying that we don't have any emergencies for communities, local emergencies, regional emergencies, and our territorial emergencies. Although it would be nice to legislate and enforce that everybody that's involved has to have this, we have to understand that we have a lot of small communities where, you know, we wouldn't be able to hire people full-time within these small communities to do that. There are communities that volunteers are very important, volunteer fire departments are very important, and this also relates to emergency management organizations. There is members within the EMO organizations that are volunteers, and we have to support them that way. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. Final supplementary. Member from Range Lake.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think that response shows one of the problems with our system. I'm going to come back to that at a later day. The Minister talked about the role of the GNWT in ensuring training. The independent after-action board has recommended that ICS training is -- sorry, institutionalize ICS in all GNWT operations because regular exposure to ICS outside of emergency context builds familiarity and improves operational efficiency during a crisis. Why won't this Minister make commitments to incorporate ICS into day-to-day operations, Mr. Speaker?
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Maybe the Member didn't hear me clearly, but I did state that ICS training is part of our training within the GNWT, and our commitment to that is by having those involved in surge capacity in the departments ICS trained in order to deal with emergencies. Again, we cannot control municipal governments and tell them what kind of training they have to take. We can only support their community emergency plan and their EMO organizations with the provided training. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. Oral questions. Member from Frame Lake.
