Kevin O'Reilly

Thanks, Madam Chair. That's helpful. I'd like a little more information about specific activities and staffing that are going to be associated with each of the departments that were listed off there. Thanks, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the Minister for that. I am not prepared to engage her in a debate in question period about whether there are benefits. My purpose here is to make sure that we benefit more from resource development. In August of last year, the Assembly completed its review and passed amendments to our oil and gas legislation that, among other things, would have done away with much of the secrecy around our management of those resources. Can the Minister tell us when those amendments will finally be brought into force and what is the source of the delay?

Thanks, Madam Chair. I guess I will just go on record that I am concerned about the state of this fund, hearing that people are buying less lottery tickets than we had projected, and it's probably not going to get any better for a while. I know that there is going to be some annual reporting now, as a result of changes that I pushed in the last Assembly to get public reporting of this fund on an annual basis by the MACA Minister. I am going to be watching this carefully. What I don't want to see happen, though, is that we reduce the level of support for our youth in sports in the Northwest...

Thanks, Madam Chair. The line item on this page that my colleague from Yellowknife North just mentioned was the Part 2 of the Climate Change Strategic Framework Action Plan, and I was just looking at the document. It goes on for pages and pages. What specific parts is this going to fund? The value of that work has got to be probably in the neighbourhood of tens of millions of dollars. What specifically is this work going to accomplish? If the Minister can't give it to us now, it would be helpful to get that list and communicate that to the public, as well, because I have no idea what we're...

Merci, Monsieur le President. Members of the last Assembly and the public spent a considerable amount of time reviewing and improving proposed legislative changes to increase benefit retention from resource development. This work was long delayed and meant to start to fulfill the promise of devolution.

Amendments were also made to the oil and gas legislation to flip the secrecy onus, to make everything public unless there is a good reason not to. We are still waiting to have this new approach come into force. On the mining side, there is the potential for benefit agreements for Indigenous...

Thanks, Madam Chair. I just wish I had the encyclopedic knowledge of my colleague, the honourable Member for Nahendeh, because he was passionate about this in the last Assembly. I sat next to him, so a little bit of it rubbed off on me. This is an interesting line item because we took the money out of the MACA budget, or some people agreed to take the money out of the MACA budget. I will put it at that. Now it's being put back in, where it should have been left to support these activities. Can I get an explanation as to why it's going back at this point? Is this a permanent increase over time...

Thanks, Madam Chair. Any sense of when this review is going to be completed, and can I get a commitment out of somebody to share that with the Regular MLAs? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thanks, Madam Chair. I do want to commend the Minister and my friends in Cabinet for finding money to invest in this mandate item. This is good. I served on city council, so I know that municipal governments make good use of this money. What I want to get some assurance of is that there is actually someone or some way of tracking what the municipal funding gap actually is. That was done, I think, in the 17th Assembly. There was a task force between MACA and NWTAC, representation from different kinds of communities, small regional centres, and Yellowknife. They worked together on rejigging the...

No. Thanks very much.

Thanks, Madam Chair. Yes, I agree with the Minister that there's a lot of work that needs to be done here, and there are a lot of matters of public interest, including royalties and so on. I'm just kind of curious, though, why ITI gets to go back to the well, and other departments that dealt with post-devo legislation like ENR, there's a new Protected Areas Act, Environmental Rights Act. They're still working on a Forest Act, minutes of the Environmental Protection Act, the Waters Act. Why that department, in particular -- and even the Department of Lands, they've got the Public Lands Act. It...