Mr. Chairman, clearly there is a significant number of challenges in that area. I am intrigued. You talked about basically hundreds of places they are doing assessments of the water. It is difficult to pull them together. Is that actually part of the fed’s plan, is to pull together the data from all of those different individuals or groups or organizations or companies, pulling together the data? Are they only going to be compiling the data they collect themselves? The reason I ask is, if they are not, why would we wait for somebody else to compile it? Is there not an opportunity for us, if the feds aren’t doing it, to compile some kind of information and create our own sort of data base or one-stop shop for where all this information lies so that we can be comfortable that we have an idea of the status and quality of our water? Obviously, I would rather the feds do it, quite frankly. If they are not, the data is out there. Can it be pulled together from all of those sources so that we have a real clear vision of our water quality in the North?
Mr. Chairman, that is one of our goals coming out of our water strategies, to have the best information possible. Our challenge is to continue to work with this since this is still an area of shared jurisdiction and we will continue to be even after we take over authority, is to work with Environment Canada and DFO to make sure that we do coordinate that the system as efficiently and tightly as possible. The federal government, Environment Canada, is looking at, most immediately, in terms of putting in the proper monitoring that does not now exist for the oil sands development. At the same time, they know as well as we do that there are all these other sites out there that have a beneficial function to play.
So there’s going to be an action plan coming out of this. How do we do this? In 90 days they aren’t going to be able to create a whole system in its entirety. I don’t think they are going to be able to get the key elements in place. We are going to have to be working with them to make sure that it doesn’t stop after 90 days. Thank you.
Just in closing, I appreciate all the work that’s been done in this area. This is one area that I think the department could push harder. If you look at our map, if our water is ruined, that affects, out of 33 communities, that immediately affects I think it’s 25 of them, which are on the downriver side of the water coming down that river. So 25, I think. I can recheck but 25 communities will be immediately affected if the quality of the water changes. So this is obviously something that’s important to us in our future, to all the people, and please push. Please push hard on this one. Please make some progress. Please make sure it’s as binding as possible and get the feds to do whatever they can to protect our water.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Just a comment there. All this talk of caribou and pristine water has heightened my appetite for supper. So I think what we’ll do is we’ll have Mr. Yakeleya up right after the break, but let’s take a break and have supper.
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Thank you, I’d like to call committee back to order and once again we’re on page 13-29, Environment and Natural Resources, activity summary, land and water, and we had Mr. Yakeleya up next. Mr. Yakeleya.
That was a good meal, Mr. Chair. I want to just ask three questions of the Minister. I’m very pleased the Minister said the Aboriginal communities are going to be involved with some of the design and the monitoring with the federal government and our government. I wanted to ask the Minister if an emphasis on traditional knowledge would be included with the design of some of the monitoring. There’s some information that people have on the Mackenzie that’s very valuable, especially with some of the elders that we have along the Mackenzie River to look at this aspect of the monitoring. That will be my first question.
My second question would be I think one of the Members talked about a clearing house where all the different agencies and boards would put their information together. We notice that in Norman Wells with the oil fields in the middle of the Mackenzie situated on the islands that there’s different agencies monitoring the Mackenzie River and that there’s Imperial Oil, there’s the federal government and territorial government and other agencies that are monitoring the quality of water, hence you have the issue with Fort Good Hope fish and people living down that river that could be in harm’s way. This has to stop and that they have one central clearing house for all the information that could be accessed by the communities and ourselves to keep an eye on the quality of water and the monitoring.
My last question to the Minister is to strengthen the Mackenzie River, as Mr. Abernethy has said, the majority of communities that would be greatly affected should something drastic happen on the Mackenzie, would we give more strength to the Mackenzie River if we had some type of designation to the river? For example, a heritage river designation, a certain framework of the heritage that there would be certain monitoring, certain responsibility by the federal government to keep a closer eye on the Mackenzie River. Right now we don’t have that. We’re relying on our river to be in good shape and we’re relying on the industry to tell us that harmful chemicals are not going to be polluting our rivers, and we’re relying on a lot of good faith of governments to tell us that our rivers are okay. We don’t have anything concrete enough to say that our Mackenzie River has to follow certain guidelines. I’m hoping that with the information we gather in the monitoring that maybe we would step it up. I’m not too sure how soon that would be implemented. The Minister talked about the quality of water that we could get in terms of monitoring. That would give us our stronger points to negotiate a stronger transboundary agreement. We’ve been at that for a bit of time and we are still, as we speak right now, there is still stuff going into our rivers. Every day that we sit here there are still chemicals and other pollutants going into our rivers that we’re not sure of. So I wanted to raise these points with the Minister.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The first question, just so it’s clear, Minister Bob McLeod and I had supper with Minister Kent and we raised the issue with the monitoring program, encouraging him to have Aboriginal representation on the board for it to be truly representative and successful, and we made the case. The Premier initially was there, but we made that case and that’s where we left that one.
The clearing house of information, we’ve talked about that. That’s one of our goals going out of the Water Strategy over time, is to be able to connect and make sure that we’re coordinated in terms of the gathering of the information and having it accessible. The heritage river has been looked at in the past and there has not been unanimity in proceeding with that initiative. There was some support on parts of the river, no support in others and we have to be very careful and look very closely at what that would mean if the whole river was in fact designated a heritage river. So there has been work done on that in the past, but there’s nothing current on our to-do list with that issue. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister. Thank you for those comments. Next on my list I have Mr. Krutko.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have a question in regard to contract services at $848,000. Could you give us an idea of what that’s for, contract services? Is that consultants?
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. I’ll turn to Ms. Magrum for that.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The funding for land and water is mostly strategic initiative funding. So it would be around the strategic initiatives under land and water for 2011-12. There’s new funding for that and there was actually more new funding in ‘10-11 under land and water related to the Water Strategy, watershed decision-making tool support. So these would be for contracts related to those initiatives. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This issue has come up in other departments and also on the previous page. I was going to ask a question earlier, but again, in order to depend so heavily on contract services, is that because you don’t have the internal capacity to carry out this responsibility or because the groups that you require that information from bring a special type of knowledge to the table, which we don’t have? I know that has come up with other departments. It seems like we’re either using a lot of contract services and contracting a lot of stuff that could be done internally. So I’d just like to ask what’s the purpose of that line item.
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As we initiated and charted off with the Water Strategy, we had extensive contract assistance. It was a very highly specialized area. We had all very, very limited water expertise in the department. Over the last year there’s been a diminishment in the contract levels, especially as it pertains to water. We’ve now had the benefit of getting some resources to set up our own land and water unit. We’ve been able to hire people of the calibre of Dr. Kelly. We still rely on specialized services periodically.
On the forestry side, of course, we make extensive use of contracts with fire crews. We make extensive use of contracts with planes. Some of the caribou work we do there’s only two planes in North America that do that, that kind of take pictures and be able to count all the caribou. There are a number of areas where there’s highly specialized areas. We’ve been working hard to cut back on our level of contracting now that we actually have the strategy in place.
In regard to the area of land and water, more importantly water, because of the Mackenzie watershed and the tributaries of one end of the Northwest Territories either through the Yukon, Alberta, B.C., Saskatchewan. I think we do have to realize, did we notify the federal government or the Alberta government when the federal government made the announcement that they were going to formulate a review committee to look at the whole area of water resources that flow through the Fort McMurray area? Did we recommend or consider the option of having someone there or consider appointing someone of our liking to that tribunal whether it’s a federal tribunal or whatnot?
That was a federal announcement based on the result of the findings of a panel that looked at the work and there were some current studies like the one done by Dr. Schindler and Dr. Kelly. A panel came out and said that there were significant gaps in the role the federal government was supposed to be fulfilling. They announced that they were going to set up this monitoring. They announced they were going to set up a panel to oversee that. We do have, as I indicated, the benefit of having one of our staff on there, Dr. Kelly, who is sitting on that panel.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Thank you, committee. Page 13-29, Environment and Natural Resources. Mr. Krutko. Sorry, I cut you off there.
That’s okay. I’m used to that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, because I think we do have some legal standing when it comes to the agreements we have with the Mackenzie basin watershed agreements and the other jurisdictions. I think we also have to, I know Mr. Yakeleya raised this question about water rights and whatnot. I think under the land claims agreement and treaty and rights in Canada, Aboriginal First Nations people do have rights to water, regardless of quality, quantity, rate of flow. It’s in the modern day treaties and is recognized internationally that they do have rights to water. I think, if anything, that’s something that we should be working on to maybe use that as an argument going forward.
I think people up and down the valley and even the Mackenzie Delta, we are concerned about what’s happened with McMurray. If you ever have a breach in one of the major dykes there, you’re talking about polluting the whole Mackenzie basin. If you ever have a breach of one of the large tar ponds in McMurray. I think we have to be realistic that chances of that happening might be one chance in a thousand or one chance in a million, but the chance is there. I think we have to be cognizant of that and we have to be prepared for that.
I’d just like to ask the Minister if we have ever looked at the possibility of not only working with the federal government but also looking at the international court or the United Nations and using the UN declaration or looking at the possibility of the rights of the indigenous peoples that was just signed off. If we use those tools as arguments that we can use. I know we can’t force people to come to the table and sign these bilateral agreements with us, but we have to realize that we are... Anything that happens upstream we’re the ones that are going to be affected the greatest because we’re at the headwaters. We’re downstream of all these resource developments in the southern jurisdictions. Have we considered those as alternatives?
We deliberately called the Water Strategy Northern Voices for Northern Waters because we know it’s of interest and of great concern to all Northerners. We know that there’s a strong natural alliance with the territorial government and the Aboriginal governments as we work collectively together to protect our interests and ensure that we have these agreements, these legally binding transboundary agreements.
The Mackenzie River Basin Act has given us a vehicle to move forward on that. All the other jurisdictions have indicated willingness. We intend to continue on a going forward basis the strong relationship with the Aboriginal governments in the North as we go to the table to negotiate the bilateral agreements. We believe that we will be successful using that process. These are all steps we would first take before we would even contemplate something like the Member is talking about. We also know that there are, across the country, untested areas of what treaties and land claims mean legally when they talk about the water issues and protection of waters and what does that mean.
For ourselves going forward, we’re working on a good-faith basis with the other jurisdictions and we’ve been successful to this point, and we anticipate, though there may be frank and forthright discussions, that at the end of the day we will get the agreements that everybody knows we need.
Again, last year I asked the question that I’m going to ask again. We requested having a water conference. I know there was a conference in Fort Simpson and Fort Good Hope and I know I requested a conference for the Peel River watershed. Could you give me an update of where we’re at with that? I think time might be running out here so I think we have to get that off the ground. There is in conjunction with what’s happening in the Peel River watershed with the Yukon coming to some arrangement that they’re going to try to have the arrangement agreed to the land use planning for the Peel River watershed agreed to by October. I think it falls right in line with the establishment. The Yukon is the only area we have a bilateral agreement with. I think this is a perfect opportunity to formulate that agreement and really use it as a tool to deal with the other watersheds we have, whether it’s the Liard watershed or the Slade watershed or other watersheds in the Northwest Territories. I’d just like to know what the status of that conference is and where we are with the Yukon bilateral, and also maybe consider the Peel River watershed as the area we can really focus on in trying to conclude a bilateral agreement on the Peel River watershed.
The Gwich’in Tribal Council and ENR jointly put on a conference last week. The focus was the Mackenzie and the Peel. The work is proceeding on the bilateral that we have with the Yukon. We’ve been in contact with the Yukon Minister to indicate we think it’s time to review that. It was the first one done. It was done under the aegis of the initial signing of the transboundary agreement where they’re not legally binding, they’re just instruments of good will. We now know that we’ve come to the point where we all need legally binding agreements. So we’re going to have to be revisiting that over the coming months with the Yukon.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Page 13-29, Environment and Natural Resources, activity summary, land and water, operations expenditure summary, $4.123 million.
Agreed.
Page 13-30, Environment and Natural Resources, activity summary, land and water, grants and contributions, contributions, $265,000.
Agreed.
Page 13-31, Environment and Natural Resources, activity summary, information item, land and water, active positions.
Agreed.
Page 13-32, Environment and Natural Resources, information item, lease commitments – infrastructure.
Agreed.
Page 13-33, Environment and Natural Resources, information item, Environment Fund. Mr. Yakeleya.
I have an issue on this one here with the recycling program. I have a concern from a constituent in the Sahtu that talks about the recycling program and the consumer is specifically in Tulita. For the past several months, there was nowhere in Tulita to return the recyclables and they are paying for the environmental fee, environmental fee upon purchases and that they are paying recycling fees and there is nowhere to get their portion of it refunded. They want to ask the department to see if they can help open up a recycling depot to help the people out. This constituent feels so strongly about that that they are asking the department to instruct the Northern Store to stop charging the fees upon purchase of these recyclable items or let the people know that this is disrespecting the people in the process. Something has got to give, so I look forward to the Minister’s leadership to deal with this issue and see how we could satisfy the consumers where there is no recyclable depots that can open and to location within the community within a short time frame. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The intent is to have an inspection and folks go in, in the next few weeks to sit down with the community to see what options are available. The current arrangement is having its trials and tribulations and we want to make sure that we have a suitable location. We also have a full sea can that is almost full that is going to be hauled out over the winter road. So we appreciate the Member raising this issue with us and we hopefully will have it resolved in the next few weeks. Thank you.
Sometime in the first week in March, I would hope that I would follow up with the community of Tulita to see if this issue has been resolved and that people in Tulita can go to a depot and get a refund. I certainly hope that there are some alternatives in place. The Northern Store is charging fees that we, in the community of Tulita, are paying extra fees and there doesn’t seem to be any support mechanisms to help them out with these extra fees. So I would leave it in the good hands of the Minister that he has stated that in a couple of weeks, hopefully, these options can be sorted out and the community can go to a depot that will have these refunds looked after, so I will take the Minister’s word on this day here and I will check in two weeks from now.
We will make every effort to have it done as soon as possible within March, but in March it will be done.
I again take the word of the Minister. In March I dare to ask him which day in March, so, I hope the Minister is going to follow through strong with his department. Hopefully before the closing of the winter road so I will leave it in his good hands. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Next on my list I have Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think my colleague should have asked the Minister if he was going to get his answer in the fullness of time, hopefully sooner than that. I do have a question with regards to recycling and the deposit that is paid on milk containers. This has been brought up before and I would like to ask again, whether or not, I guess maybe not whether or not but when the Minister will agree with a full refund of the deposit on milk containers to try and keep the price of milk as low as possible. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Mr. Bohnet.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The department is looking at that as part of its overall review of its program.
Thanks to Mr. Bohnet. I guess my next question then, would be, and maybe I missed the answer already, but when is this review going to be done and when might we see the results of it? Thank you.
Probably by July. We are making every effort to have it completed by July, Mr. Chairman.
I hope that is July of this year. Maybe I could get that clarified.
Yes, July of this year.
Committee, we are on page 13-33, Environment and Natural Resources, Environment Fund. Agreed?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Page 13-34, Environment and Natural Resources, information item, work performed on behalf of others. Agreed?
Agreed.
Thank you, committee. Page 13-35, Environment and Natural Resources, information item, work performed on behalf of others, continued. Agreed?
