Kevin O'Reilly

I would like to thank the Minister for that good information. It is great to hear that we may finally get an updated memorandum of understanding. Can the Minister tell us whether this agreement will provide for any temporary and/or permanent protection of habitat?

I appreciate the advice from the law clerk. My interpretation of that is that the Minister already has the authority to set thresholds to deal with some of the issues that he has raised about different size of commercial operations and so on, some of which may not require financial security in his or her view in the future. I don't accept the reasoning that the Minister has provided that he or she in the future requires total discretion to determine financial security and that it not be mandatory in some way. I would like to move a motion if I may, Mr. Chair on this clause.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I would suggest that Members have a look at the discussion leading up to this recommendation in the report now that it is before you. What committee observed was various approaches to trying to incorporate this idea of Indigenous rights into various bills. I guess the Public Land Act showed the minimum work with just a non-derogation clause, whereas some of the other bills actually tried to incorporate aspects of co-management or at least referenced land-rights agreements in their definitions or in the text of the bill itself.

This is trying to encourage Cabinet to develop a...

Merci, Monsieur le President. I have made many statements on the caribou crisis, in this House. During my time here, the Bathurst caribou herd has plummeted to about 8,000 animals, while our government has taken little action beyond continued restrictions on harvesting. Over the same time, the budget for Environment and Natural Resources has been slashed by 10 percent. Nothing has been done on our side of the border to temporarily or permanently protect habitat. The only new funding approved for the caribou crisis was for further study and a slight increase of the wolf bounty.

Our Minister of...

Thanks, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the Minister for raising the financial security provisions in the Commissioner's Land Act which have been in place. They were actually brought into place on February 14, 2011, and those do require that financial security for industrial and commercial purposes would be mandatory so that this has now been in place for seven or eight years, over eight years. That was largely based on the experience from what happened with Giant Mine, where our government assumed a liability of $23 million because the surface lease that we had, GNWT had for the property...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I know we are all under a lot of pressure to get this legislative backlog cleared out of here, but this is the first time I have actually seen the final report. It is the first time our colleagues in the House have seen this final report. To have it tabled or given to us earlier in the day and then expect us to actually review and debate it the same day, I just don't think this is a very good practice. I did not exercise my right to nay the unanimous consent; I could have. I just don't think this is good practice to do this, but I think it is symptomatic of the amount of...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the comments from the witness. If that is what the intention is, we should have included it in the bill itself. I would urge whoever takes up the torch after us to give this bill a very thorough going through to make sure that it does incorporate principles around polluter pays because I do not think it does, and we are going to get to some other matters in the bill itself where I think we have opportunities to address that. Those are all the comments I have for now on the purpose section. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I do support this bill because it does three things. It provides that pension credits can only be claimed in the Northwest Territories by Northwest Territories residents. It also allows a pension and dividend credits to be claimed by NWT residents with business income earned outside of the Northwest Territories. So I support it because it will help accomplish those things, and I think those have a clear public purpose. The other thing that it does provide is a mechanism for a cost-of-living offset benefit related to something that shall not be named, so I do support this. I...

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Yes, I also referenced the Cabinet-approved Department of Lands Establishment Policy that references some of the same sorts of things that you see in the purpose section, so these are the reasons why the Department of Lands was set up, the principle that should guide how they operate. I am just going to read some of these: land management decision making should recognize and respect Aboriginal treaty rights; decisions about public lands should take into consideration ecological, social, cultural, recreational, and economic values; decisions about land and resources should be...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think it would be fair to say that the way that this bill has been crafted is that the committee, Regular MLAs, are not able to make any changes to it. The only thing that this bill does, and I have said this before, is set out what the carbon tax rates will be. All of the decisions around what the rebates, the grants, how the money is going to get spent, are made at the total and utter discretion of a future Minister of Finance and by Cabinet. What's the point? The bill could not be changed anyways the way that this had been put together. Thanks, Mr. Chair.