Michael Miltenberger

Mr. Chairman, this is a very important issue which is why collectively we agreed to spend the money we have and the time and resources. We are very close to the final phases of signing off our draft Water Strategy which will no longer be draft. It will be our policy base and then we also have money in the budget to look at implementing throughout the whole Mackenzie River basin.

The issue of adequate monitoring is a very significant issue, not only the amount of monitoring but are we monitoring for the right things. Dr. Schindler just completed a fairly extensive downstream assessment of water...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We will provide the program criteria to committee.

The Member’s suggestion is a serious consideration.

. In fact, through the Ministerial Energy Coordinating Committee there is funds in the budget for energy conservation and expansion of residual heat and its work through ITI and NTPC. There’s some feasibility work that was done last year, but it is one of our considerations in all the planning that’s done. It’s just not under the purview directly of ENR, but there are plans and funding and such that are through ITI and NTPC.

Mr. Chairman, last year we were asked to come back with a plan to bring up our fees. So we are working on that. We will be glad to share that plan with the committee, with the Members. Part of the focus that we have talked about in that the farmers invested a significant amount of time and effort as a whole area of conservation education and hunting education so that we can work with parents, traditional knowledge, elders, to make sure that people have the proper respect both for the land and the animals that they are harvesting. I will let the deputy minister speak a bit more to that and...

Mr. Chairman, as I indicated earlier, we are currently redoing our Forest Management Plan and specifically the values at risk that currently are critical to that plan and, at this juncture, it doesn’t include as a value at risk the habitat protection for species like caribou, for example, so that we could plan for if we are going to consider looking more where the burns are, are there corridors where they can travel, where there is enough food and those types of things. It is an issue that has been around for quite a while. We haven’t reviewed the values at risk now for many years. We are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When we made the Discovery Air loan there was considerable angst and agitation by some Members on the other side of the House. There was great concern about what was done. A freeze was put on the fund until it could be sorted out as how to go forward with the remaining money. We agreed to do that. We waited five or six months for a response from the committee. They said to come back and give us some options and we’ll tell you what we think. In the meantime, even though this was shared in confidence with committee, the Member has pointed out that we’re having some...

We agree with the Member that we want to find even a smaller scale project. In a small community, if we could hook up two or three big buildings to a biomass heater like they have done at the jail here or like they have done in some of the other government facilities, but for the community.

The other broader issue for creating an industry is tied to that whole issue of sustainable forests around communities and access to land so that you can in fact manage the forests, do your fire protection but have a close by source of wood, be it for woodchips, firewood or pellets. We are looking at some of...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have initiated correspondence and put in the request to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to look at their fishing permits. At the same time we’re also looking at our own hunting permits and looking at bringing those up as well.

We can provide the committee the up-to-date summary of the work that’s been done to date. The focus, as we’ve been discussing here today as we look at biomass, is going to be around communities and sustainable harvest and managed forests, so a lot of the work that’s been done is starting to shift as we look at working with communities to put in pilot projects. That determination almost on a community-by-community basis. But I’ll ask the deputy if he has any further information. If not, we will commit to provide a detailed update to committee.