A signature program of Caroline Cochrane’s NWT government, which promised a “fundamental shift” in how the territory plans its spending, concluded this month in a six-page report produced without fanfare.
No news release accompanied the document, which was placed on the legislature’s website.
Government renewal was announced in October 2020 by Caroline Wawzonek – then and now the territory’s finance minister – as a means of upending the NWT’s annual budgets.
The minister said she wanted to move away from “incremental budgeting,” which she said involved making minor increases or decreases year on year without any room for a response to “new or changing priorities.”
What would follow, Wawzonek said, would be an “evidence-based evaluation of where government resources are spent,” department by department. She said government renewal would “reimagine how we obtain, manage and control” the territory’s financial resources.
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In 2021, the GNWT expected government renewal to be wrapped up by March 2025. Last week’s document states it actually ended in the spring of 2026.
In 2022, government renewal was credited with providing some of the rationale for the merger of two GNWT departments.
Initially mentioned in the legislature dozens of times a year, the initiative was still buzzy enough by 2023 that candidates to succeed Cochrane as premier namechecked it in speeches to MLAs.
However, the phrase subsequently faded away.
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It was mentioned by Wawzonek on only two sitting days this year – on February 6 in response to questions from Great Slave MLA Kate Reid, and again on Thursday in stating out loud that the final report was being tabled.
To some MLAs, government renewal appeared to peter out. “I think it was a great initiative,” Frame Lake’s Julian Morse said last year. “It hasn’t quite taken on the urgency that I think it needed to.”
The final report published this month did not associate any dollar value with government renewal’s work. “Direct cost savings were not consistently quantified,” the report stated.
Instead, the report said government renewal had delivered 11 evaluations of programs or services – a 12th was ongoing at the time of the report’s completion – and five “program design projects.”
The report asserted that government renewal’s primary legacy was a more evidence-based approach to budgeting, alongside a better means of evaluating what government does, that will now be the responsibility of departments rather than a central initiative.
A four-line conclusion avoided pointing to any single success and an appendix of completed projects listed no measurable outcomes, instead describing programs as having been strengthened or improved.
“The principal result,” the conclusion stated, is “a foundation for ongoing evaluation work across departments rather than the completion of any single project or review.”
