Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I totally agree with you. To my right, I have Mr. David Stewart, who is the deputy minister of Finance. To my left, I have Cherie Jarock, who is our legislative counsel. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Member makes a good point. There is always money for infrastructure projects that creates employment across the Northwest Territories. It is what the people of the Northwest Territories have told us is one of their priorities, is to work. The range plan will serve as a document to guide the GNWT.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This motion is to replace the schedule in Bill 42 to change the date when the carbon tax comes into effect to September 1, 2019, and ensure that the per-unit volumes for natural gas are accurate by changing "litre" to "cubic metre." Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We did task our officials to come up with some technical information, and we have a very close relationship with the Government of Nunavut. The 2017 MOU helped to formalize and support our longstanding relationship. The new MOU will focus on several key areas, including research and monitoring, data sharing, harvest management, predators, habitat, and co-management. We will continue to work with our partners over in Nunavut on the proposed MOU with the goal to complete this by the upcoming fall of this year, actually. We will be informed by ongoing discussions with our co-management partners...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the time. The Member makes some comments there and some accusations. We have worked with committee. They were aware of the September 1st deadline, and I think the fact that we wanted to get it in writing is because committee had asked us to provide it, and we did.

I'm not going to get into that debate. There are a number of debates that we could get into, but the bottom line is the federal government has informed us, and this had been out there for a while, that September 1st was our deadline. We worked in collaboration with them to go from the original July...

I agree with the Member that protection of our citizens should be the number one priority of this government, and as such, as I said before, we do have another renewable resource officer who is going to the community, and I am sure that they will be doing some patrols to ensure that the bears are not becoming a problem and coming into the community. I think we've seen a number of cases of bears in the community, in some of the communities around the Northwest Territories. Our staff are being vigilant and, if we have to, we will bring in extra people to help with that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The original date of implementation was July 1st, but because we needed to work on our legislation, we had approached Canada to see if we can delay the implementation. They understand our process, therefore we agreed to it. We had hoped to deal with this during our clause-by-clause so that we wouldn't have the debate on the floor of the House. I will be moving a motion later to change the implementation date from July 1st to September 1st. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I know that, from questions from the Member in the past week, he asked about the relocation. I had committed to getting costs. I have not seen those costs yet, but I would imagine that it would be fairly expensive. Again, we need to have a look at it and explore all options in trying to alleviate the grizzly bear problem in Aklavik.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the time. We started working with committee in June of 2017, and it is misleading to tell the public that the federal approach is superior to ours. The Member failed to mention that our point-of-sale rebate on heating fuel, the rebate at the point of purchase, is an additional $400-something per household in the Northwest Territories. We give bits and pieces of information, but we need to give all of the information, the correct information, and committee has had a lot of that information.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Government of the Northwest Territories made a mandate commitment to finalize a strategic plan to enhance existing programming and build new partnership initiatives to support healthy and sustainable traditional lifestyles and to develop country food programming to promote the consumption of wild foods.

This month the Department of Environment and Natural Resources released its Sustainable Livelihoods Action Plan, a strategic document that will meet those mandate commitments by helping to provide better support to Northwest Territories communities in the overall...