Caroline Wawzonek

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following two documents: 2025-2026 Main Estimates and 2025-2026 Business Plan Update. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I receive a regular weekly report on what's been delivered, and I'm more than happy to make sure I do try to send that out to MLAs but I will, again, certainly make my best efforts to do that now.

As far as the schedule of deliveries, I'm certainly quite happy to ask that the department try to do that. I also am receiving the one from Imperial. With respect to the ones from fuel services division, the same folks typically that are actually doing the resupply would then be the ones having to issue out the schedule so there, at times, might be some delays...

Mr. Speaker, again, I'm not sure who all is here, but I know that Gayla Thunstrom, the UNW president was here and she also happens to be a Yellowknife South resident. Also representing Yellowknife South here today, Mr. Speaker, North Slave Metis Alliance president Marc Whitford, and I'm very proud to say he is a resident of Yellowknife South. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So, Mr. Speaker, when this first went out a year ago, or about 2023, rather, for rounds of consultation, the proposal was to do an approach where we would have First Nations, Inuit, Metis persons or members or descendants from groups within the Northwest Territories' boundaries as a first priority and all Indigenous Canadians second priority. As I said, there are a number of people within the Northwest Territories, Indigenous, who -- part of that process and said, look, this doesn't capture me, please, can it be more inclusive. Again, there's no policy that's going to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we're not looking to take away benefits from Northerners. Firstly, the definition under the affirmative action policy isn't always what people think it is. You can be born in the Northwest Territories and move to anywhere else in Canada. You are still going to be benefitting as a P1. So it's not necessarily as simple as all that. And, yet, that reality has been on the books for 35 years. So there's lots of folks who come up to the North, who live in the North who are not P1s. In fact, they have no category or status whatsoever. There's folks who may live...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the work of committee. I was relatively agnostic towards most of the recommendations and quite happy to just accept them and to -- yes, again, I'm not on the committee. It's a lot of work to go through these things. I'm glad they've done it, and I appreciate the recommendations. This one, obviously, has come up now, and there's been a lot of discussion. I have had a lot of opportunity over the last five years to sit in the witness chair during Committee of the Whole between different departments, particularly the Finance. It is actually a great...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I have on many an occasion provided this House, both this government and the last, with my own frustrations with this carbon tax and the bit of stink I've raised with the federal Ministers responsible for putting us in the situation we are in.

Mr. Speaker, certainly, again, happy to go and look at it and if there's a way that I can appropriately and responsibly get ourselves out from underneath this tax, that's fine. It's not really a time where I necessarily want to try to stick it to the federal government or make something difficult or suggest that we're...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, until there's a change in the federal legislation, we are still obligated to comply with some form of carbon taxation and so, again, pending what may or may not be happening on a federal level or when, then we will certainly want to make sure that we're ready, and it's very helpful and handy to have something at the ready when that day comes. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's -- obviously, there's staff across the departments that are involved in this work but, quite specifically, there actually are individuals from the education councils who are involved, as I said, on this committee that's supposed to start moving some of these actions forward and supposed to be monitoring the success of them. The education councils are somewhat separate certainly from what may be happening in ECE, and so it was important to have them included and involved. The problems and challenges they may have could be quite different and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this is a particular one that I read several of the individual EESSs for individual departments as well as for the GNWT as a whole, and there's often an interesting correlation between when information is not flowing and then what that can do to the overall morale in an individual place. So this is one of some particular interest to me, so -- and, again, on this one, Mr. Speaker, this is where each department, because there are often different processes and different types of hierarchies within them are expected to have those individualized plans. Again, I...