The Northwest Territories' government has yet another travelling roadshow making the rounds.
This time it's a Minister's Forum on Health and the goal is to go to the communities to gather input on ways to sustain and improve the health and social services systems in the NWT.
Which is fine, assuming that it doesn't turn into another Minister's Forum on Education or the more recent community consultations on Bill 15. Remember them? When the government spent weeks visiting communities and getting input so it could go ahead and ignore it all?
Rather than expensive roadshows that go nowhere, perhaps what the NWT really needs are leaders with enough political will and common sense to do what is necessary without everybody patting them on the head first.
As if we didn't have enough problems, the good people of the NWT now have to cope with the selection of a new coat of arms and a flag.
Submissions from the public for the designs were collected Friday.
Apparently, suggestions and designs have been streaming into the committee charged with the responsibility for determining our identity.
The NWT has become a smaller version of the Canadian nation. Now that division is done and we know who we aren't, we agonize over exactly who we are.
Nunavut, on the other hand, like our American neighbours, seems to have no doubt about their place in the world. While the people of Nunavut see themselves in ulus, inukshuks and polar bears, the NWT struggles to fight off the symbols that linger from a colonial administration while having no clear idea of what to replace them with.
The NWT embodies several different cultures, all of which see themselves as quite independent of one another. That is both the territory's strength and its weakness.
Incorporating what makes the NWT distinctive into a readily-identifiable symbol is a real challenge.
What will no doubt be a bigger challenge will keeping the fractious people of the NWT happy. After all, this is a group that can't agree on how to govern themselves, never mind agree on what's flying from the flagpole.
What is disconcerting about all of this is that the decision lies in the hands of yet another committee of MLAs.
There are times when the elected leadership should stand aside and let the people have their say. We are, after all, a jurisdiction governed by consensus.
Surely something as meaningful as the territorial flag is the sort of issue that is best decided by the people.
What we don't need is a flag and a coat of arms guaranteed to expire immediately after the next election.
There have been some rumblings and mumblings in the hunting community about the move away from lead shot to more nontoxic alternatives.
The biggest single complaint making the rounds seems to revolve around the cost of the steel and composite shot being placed on the market to replace the lead. Admittedly, the cost of shells is going to be two to five times as high, depending on what you opt for, but the long-term savings to the environment will be immense.
Lead shot has been slowly poisoning wetlands and the birds and animals that inhabit them for as long as it has been in use. There is no question left about that.
The only question left is whether hunters are willing to cough up more to assure that there will always be birds to hunt and to protect wetlands.
Alarm bells went off last week when we read about the recent U.S.-based project on Axel Heiberg Island.
The Nunavut island, just west of Ellesmere Island, is home to 45-million-year-old fossils, Canada's own petrified forest, and is clearly one of the last links to our planet's past.
Oh, the island's not new to research and it's not the research we find offensive.
Canadian scientists have been studying the area for years, even going so far as to setting up an on-site lab so that materials studied wouldn't have to be removed from their historic homeland.
But when you hear about the recent U.S.-based study and read the reaction the project is getting from our own country's science community, the warning signs start hitting the ceiling.
The project involves 13 scientists who have not only been accused of collecting data already published by Canadian scientists, but had originally intended to excavate as much as 3,000 square metres of the area.
As it turns out only a total of 30 kilograms of material was removed from a 150 metres area.
It was still a job that involved picks and shovels and even a chainsaw to remove the petrified fragments.
Then, if that's not enough destruction for you, you've got the beating the area is getting from tourists -- cruise ship passengers, including Americans, who are re-boarding their liners "leaving with their pockets full" of a little memento from the island.
Our view is simple.
If the U.S. is so hell-bent on not allowing polar bear furs and precious ivory into their country -- an industry the rightful tenants of Nunavut are desperately losing out to on account of these American regulations -- then why should we allow this to happen.
The United Nation's bid to turn the area into a World Heritage site is one solution that our government shouldn't ignore.
This pillaging of our planet must be stopped.