Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There were a terrible lot of lies going around the world about fracking and the worst thing of all is some of them are true. The fact is, we don’t know what the truth is about fracking until we have done our research. The GNWT and Members on this side of the House continue to go down this path and this narrative of fracking.
Is fracking right for the Northwest Territories? Yesterday I tried to articulate some of the concerns that need to be looked at if our government chooses to travel down this journey, down this path to resource riches, as we have described it. Yes, I agree with my colleague Mr. Yakeleya, from the Sahtu, that development needs to happen, and development in his region definitely deserves to happen. He will have my support when it comes to development, but is the narrative of fracking the one we wish to travel?
As I talked about yesterday, we need clear disclosure laws, public registries that show all documentation. Quite often we see the filing of technical documents by these proponents and they believe that they should make them so technical, you have to be a lawyer, engineer or even more qualified to read them.
We need laws on the books here to be developed in a way that says all documentation from any fracking policy or any company doing fracking is always in plain language. We need a public registry that spells it out to ensure that any action is taken to close gaps on problems and show that the commitments weren’t only just made but that results were achieved.
One of the problems I had seen when we travelled down to North Dakota, and I will tell you I definitely heard, was the monitoring, security, and enforcement of rules and regulations. It’s not just that we let people take water out of the ground and pump it back into the ground and then dispose of it. Quite often there wasn’t the old saying of the 360 approach. No one was watching people do what they wanted to do with those waste materials and fluids.
We heard stories about people dumping them. Why? Because it was easy and no one was looking. We heard people just dumping on old sites and saying that was their problem. Who is going to ensure that monitoring and management of these things are critically important?
You cannot go back if you have tainted the water and you have tainted the land. You get one shot at doing it right. Let’s not create another Giant Mine. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Member for Inuvik Boot Lake, Mr. Moses.
