Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are addressed to the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources. I’d like to follow up on my Member’s statement. I want to ask the Minister with regard to the project team’s response to the environmental assessment on the Giant Mine.
On October 21st this House passed a motion which said, “that the Government of the Northwest Territories accept the measures and suggestions contained in the report of the environmental assessment,” and that motion was passed by the House.
Eleven days later the project team released a letter to the public, and that was signed by an assistant deputy minister from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. I’m finding it very difficult that we have, as a government, a motion that was passed to accept the recommendations of this report and we then get a response signed by an assistant deputy minister of one of our government departments which basically refutes the recommendation.
I’d like to ask the Minister if he can explain to the House who authorized the signing of the letter which was the response to the MVERB’s report.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister responsible for Environment and Natural Resources, Mr. Miltenberger.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m the responsible Minister in this instance, and that responsibility is mine.
I understand he’s the responsible Minister; I accept that, but he’s also the Minister responsible for the environment in the NWT. He should be, in my mind, looking after the best interests of the residents of the NWT.
I’d like to know if the Minister can advise me, and advise the House and the general public, how he can be responsible for the cleanup at the mine on behalf of NWT residents, and at the same time, he is responsible for the regulation of the project, which in this case is rejecting the recommendations.
I can assure the Member and this House, and everybody listening, that I am indeed very cognizant in my responsibility as the Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, and my responsibility to make sure that we do in fact protect the environment.
As the government, one of the governments involved, the federal government and territorial government, we have a responsibility to clean up one of the worst environmentally contaminated sites in the country. It’s going to be a billion dollar project at the end of the day, and we are hard at work doing that. We get advice and recommendations from many quarters. We don’t disagree with a lot of the work or intent of what’s being presented to us through this report, but we definitely are of the opinion that they required some modification. We are the folks on the ground. We are the governments responsible; they’re going to have to be accountable, and are accountable, for how that project is carried out.
We intend to continue working with all the involved parties, but we have an obligation, and our job is to make sure, at the end of the day, we have to pull all those pieces together and make the appropriate decisions, which is what we’re doing in this case.
I’m afraid we have to agree the work that the Minister is doing is going to be in the best interest of NWT residents. This project, albeit they may be working hard at trying to do the cleanup, it’s not in the best interests of residents. Over half of the recommendations are suggested by the Giant team. The project team is suggesting that over half of the recommendations be modified or rejected.
I’d like to know from the Minister why is it so important that 50 percent, more than 50 percent of the recommendations from the MVERB report, why is it so important that they be rejected. Cost should be a factor, as I mentioned earlier.
There is not a question of have to be rejected. We did a review of the recommendations. We looked at them closely. We looked at how they all fit together. Some of them are sequential. There are issues related to time, to cost and to scope of the project. In spite of the Member’s comments that money is no object, when you’re in government, in fact, money is a constant object.
But very clearly, the concern is cleaning up the site. We don’t want any delays. Some of the concerns, in our opinion, are that some of their recommendations, because they’re sequential, for example, could add up to three to four years to the project. There is existing degradation that’s going to continue, and we have to get on with the process of doing the freezing that’s been agreed to of the 237,000 metric tonnes of arsenic trioxide.
We’re going to continue to do all the work necessary and we’re going to continue to work with the folks here. There are some issues that we don’t agree with, and so, as the Member is fond of saying, on some of these issues we’re going to have to agree to disagree, I would imagine.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Final, short supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s unfortunate that the Minister feels we have to disagree on something which would go towards assuaging the concerns of residents, particularly here in Yellowknife.
I’d like to ask the Minister if he can tell me, one of the recommendations which was rejected referenced an oversight of the project, and there’s no recognition from the response from the team of environmental agreements that have been worked on. There is no recognition that oversight is a very large concern for residents.
Can the Minister tell me, again, to this particular one, why is oversight of the project a recommendation that he is rejecting?
With the issue of oversight, there has been a general agreement. There were, in fact, letters written where the Giant Mine Remediation Project Environmental Monitoring Advisory Committee would not make decisions with respect to the operations of the project. Operation responsibilities and decisions would remain with the developer in a joint letter in response to the review board on June 11, 2012. The question is what type of an oversight, and there’s a difference of opinion between the oversight meaning a veto and oversight means best advice and recommendations as we on the operational side as responsible Ministers do the work necessary to remediate that particular site. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
