As communications director to Premiers Bob McLeod and Caroline Cochrane, I have seen my fair share of controversy surrounding the GNWT. And one of the things I learned during 10 years of helping craft public explanations for unpopular decisions was that governments can frequently be their own worst enemies.
They often make things worse, sacrificing their own credibility by trying to wriggle out of difficult situations instead of owning their decisions and explaining their choices. Unfortunately, the current cabinet appears to be making exactly that mistake in the face of a call from MLAs for a formal public inquiry into the GNWT’s handling of the 2023 forest fire season.
Nobody should be surprised that NWT residents want to find out exactly what went on last summer, and a call for a public inquiry is entirely reasonable. With more than 70 per cent of NWT residents ordered out of their communities and significant fire losses in some regions, NWT residents deserve the full and complete accounting for government choices and decisions that a public inquiry would provide.
What cabinet is offering instead is something they are calling an ‘independent review’.
On its face, an independent review might sound like a fine idea, but scratch the surface and some important questions emerge. Who would be in charge of an independent review? Who would decide what gets reviewed, what questions get asked, and who is allowed to participate? Unsurprisingly, the answer is that the very people whose actions must be reviewed would make those decisions.
There are no rules for an independent review in government legislation or policies; an independent review, it turns out, is whatever the government says it will be. And what they mean when they say “independent review” is actually just a consultant, hired by the government, taking direction from the government, reporting to a senior public servant, and mostly working behind closed doors.
That doesn’t sound independent at all. Nor does it meet reasonable standards for the kind of transparency needed to create public confidence that all the evidence has been put on the table and that the really hard questions about what happened last summer have been asked and honestly answered.
A public inquiry, on the other hand, would have its independence and transparency guaranteed under the Public Inquiries Act. Once established, the inquiry would decide on its own proceedings and be able to call anybody to appear as a witness and compel them to give evidence under oath. That’s a level of fact-finding that is simply not going to be available to a contractor conducting private interviews and surveys.
The act also requires all hearings to be open to the public, except where public security or intimate personal or financial information might be revealed. And it allows anybody with a direct and substantial interest to ask to put their story on the record, in their own words.
To be clear, this process would be managed — people wouldn’t just get to show up and unload on government. The inquiry would ask for and review applications from anybody wanting to give evidence before hearing from them, but that is still a guarantee that participation won’t be limited to just whoever the GNWT’s contractor decides to interview or by the questions they choose to ask.
Finally, the findings and recommendations of a public inquiry would be completely under the control of the inquiry and based on evidence transparently available to the public. Reports of consultants are typically shared with the government before they are published and there is almost always ‘discussion’ of their contents. Even if the GNWT promised not to edit this report, the findings and recommendations would still depend on how the contractor decides to interpret and present the information it has gathered. The public would likely never have access to that information itself, nor any way to know what participants had actually said.
The premier has said an inquiry could cost millions and cause government to grind to a halt. This is fear-mongering. The inquiry will be given a budget and a timeline when it is established; it can’t simply run amok. And it is an unworthy argument to make when government credibility and public confidence are at stake.
Democracy runs on trust, and when trust and confidence are in question, governments have to go above and beyond to restore them. Lesser measures and compromises are not enough. And while an inquiry will have a price tag and take effort, it would be an investment in our democracy and a concrete way for this new cabinet to show that they take the people of the NWT seriously.
—Shaun Dean is a former director of cabinet communications for the GNWT.