Brendan Bell

Thank you. The Member will remember the $250,000 contribution that this government made at the end of the last assembly. It was for aurora recovery. That money was further levered through the Canadian Tourism Commission and amounted in what we believe is around $900,000 in investment spent both domestically and in Japan to try to reinvigorate the industry. We are hearing from the NWT Arctic Tourism Association and others that they believe this has been very successful. They are thankful for the support. Really the proof will be in the pudding with the upcoming season in terms of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Obviously this is a difficult situation, but I think it's going to eventually be a good-news story going forward for the industry. We know that aurora visitation numbers have declined drastically, after 9-11 and other geopolitical events: the war in Iraq, there was also SARS and a number of events I think Mr. Braden has alluded to. Things have been a little more difficult since then, obviously. I think things are starting to turn around. I'm hopeful; I'm optimistic. Obviously this company had a couple of choices to make while things were improving. I think they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the next couple of weeks I will be before Cabinet and be making a presentation to Cabinet. Assuming endorsement of that presentation and assuming there aren't significant changes, I will very quickly then be able to come to committee. We will work with the Clerk's office to schedule something as soon as possible. I appreciate that summer is coming and it will be more and more difficult to get Members together, so I understand the urgency and will move quickly on this. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, that’s an interesting question and I would say and restate that I am certainly wiling to come to the Member’s riding and sit down and better understand the needs of the community as it relates to this piece of infrastructure. We can talk about what it actually costs to run. I would like to see it. Obviously we have concerns about the health risk. We have talked in past about liability. Internally in the department we have had discussions about that. That is becoming more and more of a concern for public governments. I know our Department of Finance risk management division have...

Thank you. The Member is certainly right; we have monitoring obligations. We have obligations that are shared with BHP and with Diavik, and we will with DeBeers, as well. We are proposing to set up a joint monitoring board under the terms of the new agreement, and have done likewise in some of the past agreements. I think the Member is making the point that we need to be vigilant in monitoring. I agree with the Member. We have to ensure that the commitments being made, and that we spent so much time negotiating, are being lived up to. Obviously we have an obligation in that regard, and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We talk about the context or the frame in which negotiations were undertaken with DeBeers in this matter, in developing our socioeconomic agreement. I would say that we took our guidance from past SEA agreements with BHP and with Rio Tinto, and further to that, Mr. Speaker, followed the direction as laid out in the EA process by the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. That EA process provided the frame of reference, and laid out a number of obligations that had to be met both by the company, by DeBeers, and by our government. So we’ve used that as...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will go the Member one better. I also was a lifeguard at the beach and I hope I wasn’t frolicking on the job.

---Laughter

I recognize that it would be certainly helpful and it is important to make sure that the beach is safe. We are proposing that it be posted as unsupervised. I can’t guarantee that there will be lifeguard services at that beach, no more than the past Minister could for the past season despite the contract in place. The city was unable to provide lifeguards. So it would be misleading for me to stand here and say that I could guarantee that there would...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have the benefit of the contract in front of me, as it seems Mr. Hawkins does. I appreciate that he will table it later today, so we have it and I can probably give him some more important answers at that point. Just a little background, Mr. Speaker, though, I believe we approached negotiations with the city this year and were looking to sign a contract, recognizing that costs had increased. It has always been on a cost-shared basis in the past. Past expenditures have been about $12,000 for our government. We went into these negotiations and offered $15,000...

Thank you. In terms of negative impacts on the people of the Northwest Territories, obviously we want to mitigate those wherever possible. I can assure the Member that I’m sitting down with my colleagues, the Minister responsible for the social envelope, to first identify what those potential impacts are, and we have some I would say track record now. We can take a look at our experience with the course of the last couple of mines. I think we need to learn from that. We need to understand where the challenges are, and where there are potential impacts seek to mitigate them. There...

I think philosophically we are talking about, Mr. Speaker, the same idea. We’ve been working to negotiate a protocol agreement with the producers group. That protocol agreement would be an umbrella agreement that would spell out the number of sub-agreements that come under it. I think there are -- I am going to guess between nine and 15 -- one of those agreements would be the socioeconomic agreement, and we’ve also had discussions about the length of time it has been taking to get the protocol agreement finalized. We are in discussions with the producers group and at the same time moving...