Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Jun 14/99) - After putting the second session of the Nunavut legislative assembly to bed, a few of the MLAs and ministers were lucky enough to grab a few days rest before heading off to Baker Lake today for a five-day working retreat.

But, as the clerk of the legislative assembly, John Quirke wasn't quite so fortunate. As well as finalizing the agenda for the meeting, he spent some time looking back on the session and analyzing how it went.

"I would say it went fairly well considering it was the first full-blown session," said Quirke.

"It's one thing to go through the provisional rules of the House and another thing to be sitting in the chamber and actually experiencing the rules."

With the MLAs and many of the bureaucrats on the go since March 1, Quirke said it would have been good to have had the time to allow the members to have a mock parliament. Unfortunately, due to the short timeframe and the heavy workload, the practice run never materialized and the regular MLAs and the ministers did most of their learning on the job.

"Towards the end of the session, the members were really getting the hang of it and things started to go much more quickly than we had anticipated," said Quirke.

He said they accomplished their primary goal of presenting and passing the government's first budget with finesse, and that the session went as quickly and as smoothly as it did partly because the money plan was so inflexible.

"We knew it was a status quo type budget and we knew there wasn't a lot of opportunity to change things. That made the session as short as it was," said Quirke.

The lack of a permanent home did manage to throw a few snags into their schedule and while the long weekend in May dragged the session out for a few days, Quirke said it gave him the much-needed time to move the legislature from the Parish Hall to the Cadet Hall.

He said the assembly expects to be in its permanent legislative building in time for the third session in the fall and that just having a home and proper office and storage space would add to everyone's overall efficiency.

"I was throwing stuff behind me on Levi (Barnabas'), the speaker's platform because I had no place else to store it. We were cramped."

Quirke said it was too soon to see if the cabinet or the legislature as a whole were developing distinct personalities, but he did say they exhibited a strong willingness to work together in the true spirit of consensus government.

When the group of 19 come together again this week, they'll be talking about cabinet's priorities, decentralization and legislation development. They will also be considering which rules and procedures to keep and which to amend to make them more suitable to the Nunavut way of government. Quirke said he expected everything to go smoothly now that the government had a few weeks experience under their belts.

Olayuk Akesuk, the member for South Baffin, said he was looking forward to working with his colleagues again and had learned some valuable lessons during the past session.

"I learned how to be prepared in the legislative assembly while the assembly is actually going on. I have a much better idea now. It'll be easier for me," said Akesuk, who readily admits that being an MLA is everything he had hoped it would be.

"I'm having a ball."