Wally Schumann

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Out of that 1,724, there is $252,000 included in there for environmental monitoring for the next two years. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We believe it was between $50,000 to $100,000. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The $2.894 million is the capital money that we want to use to do the projects that I just mentioned to the previous Member. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

As the Member knows, we have all sat down with all of the Indigenous governments in the Northwest Territories, and one of the number one priorities of this Premier and this Assembly is to address land claims in the Northwest Territories. The Premier has done a tremendous amount of work on this file. We have made substantive offers to two of the three outstanding land claimant groups in the Northwest Territories, and we are working on getting something with the third one. There is some significant progress being made there. The recent announcements with the federal government on how they are...

Mr. Speaker, investments in effective and resilient infrastructure provide the foundation for a stronger North. Through infrastructure improvements, we can better connect communities to services they rely on, while mitigating the cost of living and doing business. Replacing or upgrading our assets increases our resiliency to the impacts of climate change and as we expand our infrastructure, we will support important economic development that provides residents with well-paying jobs and training opportunities.

Mr. Speaker, the Government of the Northwest Territories has often worked in...

Early in the life of this government, I was the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, so I am quite aware of the protected area strategies moving forward. This was something that was under the federal legislation, and now it has been switched over to the Northwest Territories, and we are moving on those fronts. It is a complicated file. It's not like we can just shelve all of the protected area strategies that the federal government was working on. These are led by a number of Indigenous governments, the areas that they want to protect, and it is a complicated issue.

As I have said...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are doing quite a bit. We get a lot of heat sometimes for going to some of the shows that we go to in the press. We have been to Mineral Roundup. The Premier and I have just been to PDAC, but it is one of the reasons that this government has developed a Mineral Development Strategy, and that is to address some of these inconsistencies that people have about the Northwest Territories. The 17th Assembly had signed on to devolution, and that gives us the tools that we need to change a lot of legislation to help us address some of these things, be it the Mineral Resource...

I can't give you an exact number, but I can tell you that we have met with a number of stakeholders and interested parties that want to invest in the Northwest Territories, and the ones that are investing here are glad to see the hard work that this government is doing on a number of these files, as I have said, since devolution.

We have taken over the LPs or the land and resource part of this from the federal government. It is going to create more certainty for the mining industry to come to the Northwest Territories, and we will continue to engage all residents, stakeholders, and industry on...

Yes, industry is a big part of our consultation process as industry is one of the biggest parts of our GDP of our Government of the Northwest Territories, so we have to consider their factors in, as well.

When we start talking about industry, I tend to lean a little bit more towards the mining side because they're the biggest part of our economy right now. We've taken their concerns into serious consideration on how we're moving this forward. There has been some great talk with them specifically around the carbon tax and how this is going to make implications on them. At the same time, we have...

While I believe we're already doing it because climate change is already here. When I'm speaking down south, I don't say climate change is something that's coming; it has already impacted the Northwest Territories. As a number of Members in this House know, we continue to say that it's already warmed up by 4 degrees in some parts of the Northwest Territories. So, as the Ministry of Infrastructure, in particular, we know the challenges around climate change. We have changes around construction, around maintenance, around building of ice roads, operation of government infrastructure, and that's...