Louis Sebert

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I don't know what communications there have been with the community, generally, but I know there have been discussions which are going to be ongoing as soon as a week or two from now, again, with the staff. My understanding -- and it's second-hand, of course -- is that the staff is quite enthused about this change in the facility. And just to point out, Guthrie House is not minimum security. Thank you.

Yes, that certainly is possible, that prisoners with different designations would be mixed together, but I think that that wouldn't be such a big problem because you have to be motivated to want to enter the program. Hopefully, we would have motivated people from whatever security designation: minimum, medium, or maximum. Thank you.

Thank you. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but currently, SMCC meets the needs of minimum security inmates. Again, these numbers are available, I just don't happen to have them available in front of me. I don't know how near capacity the facility is. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Well, in my long experience, not too many ask for more time. I understand what you're saying. I mean we couldn't keep people in there who weren't serving a sentence. Obviously, they would have to avail themselves of other programs.

We are dealing with this exact issue in our consultation with Indigenous groups throughout the Northwest Territories. Some of the conditions that we might see as important are Indigenous ownership located within an area where persons of that heritage have established or asserted rights, an assertion by the owner of the cabin or camp of his Aboriginal rights. So those are some of the basic things we're going to be looking at as we engage with Aboriginal groups throughout the Northwest Territories.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we know, there are many structures on the public lands that are administered by this government. That's why we're engaging with Indigenous governments at this time to determine how we can find out how many there are and on what basis the claims that they are rights-based are made.

Yes. The whole purpose of this of course is to reduce costs of maintaining separate systems across departments, and there was a mention of licences and permits. There's quite a number of them from fishing licence to pesticide business permits, so, hopefully, this will lead to a more efficient and less costly system. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. To my left, I have Brenda Hilderman, director of finance, and to my right, Willard Hagen, deputy Minister.

Those are issues that certainly will have to be determined. Once we find out how many of the cabins are actually rights-based, we will be dealing with those additional issues, also. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As I mentioned earlier, there are a great number of cabins and camps out there, rights-based ones, that would be ones that are associated with an Aboriginal right to have the cabin or camp, so that's what we're looking into at this time. We really don't know how many there are out there. That's why we're engaging with the Aboriginal groups throughout the Northwest Territories.