Floyd Roland

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The issue of the agreement-in-principle and trying to get the information out on top of the years of discussions around the negotiation of the agreement-in-principle piece we’ve looked at and sent letters out to the regional leadership and invited them to contact us to go over the agreement-in-principle and the issues they may have out of that and look at sharing in the funding of those meetings.

We do have staff throughout a number of departments, Executive, we do have people who share the workload and help us in dealing with the issue of gender-based analysis.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The work that we’ve done around the gender basis issue has been one that, as the Member has pointed out, doing some workshops and training amongst our staff within the Government of the Northwest Territories to make everyone more aware as we look at the work we do and how it influences decision-making.

We do follow our policies. Thank you.

If the Member is asking about the difference, different levels of consultation, we have a broad public consultation process for all the people of the Northwest Territories. If he’s drawing the difference between the Workers’ Safety and Compensation process as well as the Wildlife Act, quite clearly if you look at the Wildlife Act, that’s gone to every community in the Northwest Territories and has had broad consultation on that. On top of that, one of the other areas we have to fulfil is where there are land claim agreements and self-government agreements, that requires an additional level of...

The process both from the federal government and ourselves has been one to help the organizations and governments to the best way possible so that they can be involved in this and help frame up that agreement-in-principle. Our share of the Government of the Northwest Territories contribution has been $3.9 million since 2001 to this year. The Government of the Northwest Territories Executive department actually reduced our budget to go through our cost-savings exercise over the last couple of years and reduced the funding and the devolution portfolio. For example, what we’re doing right now is...

There are two pots of funding that start to flow upon signing of the agreement-in-principle. That is tied specifically to some of the work that would be prepared as groups prepare for negotiations, mandates and so on, to do the background work. The work we’re talking about doing is looking at the agreement-in-principle itself, to give the leadership and community members a better idea of just what the agreement-in-principle is. Of course, to share in the funding that’s available to Aboriginal groups, they need to sign on and that would allow the federal government to sit with them to then...

I don’t believe it’s stalled.

Again, the work that we’ve done has been more about the training, getting it through to our staff with the help of other departments like the Department of Human Resources to help us in the training and getting the knowledge out there. I’d have to get back to the department to see if in fact I will be able to have a policy to bring back to the Members.

The Member continues to stand up in this House and, in a sense, show disrespect to the process that we have put in place through regional leaders. The Member has at least in his mail copies of the letter and correspondence that we’ve sent to regional leaders to say we are working with them going forward with the regional leaders, so the grand chiefs, the presidents and the community leaders, the chiefs from their communities. We’ve invited them to give us times when they would like to meet and discuss how we proceed forward. So we’ve communicated on that behalf and await responses. In fact, we...