Dr Pickering previously served as the Seventh District Representative while current Health Minister Marlon Penn serves as the Eighth District Representative where residents in those districts have for years been beset by significant infrastructure obstacles, including poor road networks.

“It’s almost the elephant in the room,” Dr Pickering said on the Honestly Speaking show. “If I was supposed to say to you that ‘I have the answer, Eureka, I’ve found it’, then I’d be disingenuous.”

Forget the personalities

Meanwhile, Dr Pickering encouraged residents to look beyond the personalities involved and said they should instead focus on the new ideas that can take the territory forward.

The former Deputy Premier, who has since rejoined the National Democratic Party (NDP) fold ahead of the upcoming general elections, described his absence from the political scene over the last four years as a sabbatical.

He suggested that the time spent away has offered him new perspective and he proposed that new methods need to be found for doing old things. “What I would say is, clearly our approach hasn’t worked,” Dr Pickering shared.

“We have a lot of younger people now who are better educated, let’s put them to work, let’s make those young minds work for us,” Dr Pickering suggested. “Let them show us from a technological point of view, how we can find better solutions to old problems.”

The former Seventh District Rep added that he could already see critics chiding him for his new-found wisdom on the issue. “I can see people saying, ‘let he go sit down. He was one of them he ain’t do a… you know, this thing about blah, blah, blah’,” he stated.