Michael Miltenberger

We are committed to working with committee. We are going to share the work, we are going to come up with best practices, we are going to do the regulatory review from across not only the country but we’re going to look around the work to see how it’s being dealt with in other jurisdictions that haven’t had moratoriums but are actually engaged in managing this process as they look at resource development. We will come forward and we’ll map out the next steps as we do that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the Member’s sage advice and I will keep that in mind as we move forward.

I’ll commit to review the matter with the appropriate officials in the departments and if there is deemed to be a policy gap, then we’ll, of course, take the steps to close that gap.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The next major initiative that we spent some time getting ready to address is the e-waste one. As we sort out the arrangements with Alberta, and the costs and they’re going to accrue both for gathering the e-waste in the North and shipping it and doing the things we need to do, that money will come into play there as our next priority. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll make some general comments and then I’ll ask the deputy, who is much more knowledgeable about this than I am. We had a herd that was in a precipitous decline, that if we had not have stepped in, in my humble opinion as Minister, would now have ceased to exist if we had just let hunting proceed. It’s been under significant trauma. I agree with the Member that there’s only been stabilized with a marginal increase probably within the margin of error that they have for these kind of counts.

Mr. Chairman, with your indulgence, I’ll ask the deputy to speak further to...

One of the biggest generators of greenhouse gases, of course, is the generation of energy. I would suggest to you as we come forward in the coming weeks with our plan for the hydro development transmission line and grid hookups so we could have available for resource development reasonably priced locally generated energy that will probably be one of the single biggest deterrents to the increase of greenhouse gases. We look and we don’t have to tell the resource operators like the mines, for example, which put in millions of dollars into wind energy how to cut their greenhouse gases because it...

Before we leapfrog to the outfitters, we have to first sort out the resident harvest, which right now there is none, and what type of modest reinstatement could there be. Are we back to the stage, not only in addition to the resident harvest, but are we back to the stage of unrestricted Aboriginal harvest? If those two questions get answered in the affirmative, I would suggest to the Member, then, that yes, part of the discussion would be what else is possible in terms of trying to get harvesting back to its full status that it was prior to the various restrictions given the plummeting numbers...

We have $4.699 million for land and water and $1.053 million for environmental assessment and monitoring.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The work on thresholds is underway. There has been a singular success at this point with the Porcupine Caribou Management Board. The agreement they reached in the very complex political jurisdiction with the threshold I believe the Member is talking about, that triggers certain responses without any politics, it’s just based on the science and the numbers. In my opinion, that approach would serve as well across the North. We are working towards that.

Having said that, at this point the boards have been requested to review the numbers of the Bluenose-East, and the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Gwich’in Land Use Plan is complete. The Sahtu Land Use Plan is down to, I think, some final issues that are going to get resolved. I think that’s going to be concluded in the coming few months. The Deh Cho Land Use Plan, of course, is a subject that we have been talking in the Deh Cho about and we are interested in seeing if we could come to a conclusion on that as well, keeping in mind that there are politics that have happened there with Edehzhie and the K’atlodeeche folks pulling out of the process. In the South and North Slave we have no land use planning...