When it comes to the vote for the next NWT premier, I have a different view than Michael Miltenberger.
In comments to CBC Oct. 20, the former Thebacha MLA and cabinet minister defended the practice of choosing our premier in secret. He said: “If we don’t want to have the secret ballot there in the most basic and important institution we have, where else do we want to start saying, ‘We want people to vote where we can all see?’”
I am not sure what he means. Mr. Miltenberger had a secret vote like the rest of us when he voted for his MLA. There is no threat to take that away. Once MLAs are elected, transparency becomes the democratic principle of good government, the opposite of secrecy.
Other former MLAs have echoed Miltenberger’s curious equation by saying a public vote would cause resentment, hostility and retribution among the MLAs who didn’t get the votes they wanted. Aren’t MLAs expected to act professionally? Do personal feelings have a role to play? Isn’t it better we voters witness any such reaction in public rather than behind closed doors as surely happens now?
“It’s part of the process that makes it work,” Miltenberger went on to defend the secret vote for premier. The ‘it’ is consensus government and this self-serving desire for secrecy is one of the reasons it doesn’t work.
The parliamentary system we call ‘Indigenous inspired’ consensus government has no connection to Dene, Metis or Inuvialuit tradition. Our assembly operates on Bourinot’s Rules of Order, a Canadian parliamentary authority conceived in 1894, not a system of governance created by Dene, Metis and Inuvialuit. The black robes of the clerks are hardly traditional dress. Nor is there any protocol for consulting the Dene, Metis and Inuvialuit on the practice of consensus government.
In fact, when someone broke the rules in the last assembly, we hired a retired Saskatchewan judge and his friend, the prosecutor, to tell us what to do at the cost of over $500,000.
The MLAs-elect, who I came to know and respect on the campaign trail, all said they wanted change. They can begin by holding the vote for premier in public to signal they have the collective will to make the change we need. Voters have a right to know why the MLA representing their riding is supporting a candidate for premier and whether they made the right choice or not. It’s called accountability.
If our new assembly chooses not to take these steps, it signals they and we are destined to suffer more of the same poor government for the next four years that brought us to where we are today.
—Bruce Valpy is a longtime Northerner and former publisher of NNSL Media.