Thank you, Mr. Chair. I may have more questions regarding the amortization. For the sake of time and not wanting to jump around activities that have already been passed, I need to get a grasp on what exactly, in terms of capital assets, the department received during this very transitional year and how that amortization is going to look moving forward. I will end it at that. I might have questions further when it comes to amortization. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just wanted to follow up on a couple of things. First of all on the inspection side of the equation, when variances are found – and I am thinking of inspections of developments, resource exploitation-type developments – an inspector can recommend court action ultimately if things aren’t being corrected and so on. Under the federal government, in recent times, repeated variances were either ignored and not recommended for court action, or when they were, the federal court system declined to act and prosecute to correct the action as was obviously needed based on the information from the inspectors. I’m assuming that our inspectors have found some variances from what is permitted, so I’m wondering: have we taken any of these to the justice system for prosecution and penalty to try and stop such variances to date?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Warren.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. The inspectors follow kind of a four-pronged approach to how they bring about compliance. They start off with an education system. They think it’s important that people are aware of what is and isn’t allowed. They also, through their inspection process, quite often deal with a prevention matter so that they can identify something that is going to be or could be a problem in the future, but they let people know about it. Those are the ones we don’t hear about because most often they correct the problem right there and then you don’t get into a compliance situation, which is the next level around where you ask somebody and give an order to comply. Those ones, hopefully, the majority of the time, result in compliance being seen, but if they are not seen then we move on to enforcement.
We have identified enforcement as something that requires additional diligence on the part of the department. We currently have 12 active cases of where we’re taking something before the courts. We now have, as part of a standing item in our senior management committee, we meet once a month with Justice to review all compliances, and that’s done by the entire senior management because we see a role for a whole bunch of different components of the department whether it’s around land use planning to help with the education side of things or from the inspection side or from the land management side generally. We involve that, but it is something that we do take seriously and are moving more ahead on, on a number of files. But there are quite a number of files that are outstanding there that we are trying to bring into compliance through the other processes first.
Thanks to the deputy minister for that good information. I’m glad to hear we’re doing that. It seems like there’s a lot more activity than might have been happening under the previous regime. Could I just ask, have there been any taken to Justice that Justice has said they wouldn’t act on that Lands felt should be acted on?
No. There haven’t been files that we’ve advanced to Justice yet that they’ve said are not warranting taking forward.
Music to my ears. Thank you for that. I’d like to move on to illegal occupancy of land in terms of leasing and so on. The department currently sort of picks and chooses the things that it enforces with, for example, the squatters, I don’t know on what basis, but some areas perhaps where clearly the majority of the squatters are not being… The illegal occupants are not being addressed through the enforcement actions of the department. I’m just wondering why and what criteria are used to make a decision not to even sort of investigate illegal occupancy of land.
Currently, the inventory of unauthorized occupants that we’re aware of that we would have inherited on April 1st is right around 190 unauthorized occupants. As I said, we are proceeding with 12 cases. Those 12 cases were assessed internally by the department as to the ones that we thought represented the greatest risk to the environment, so they were the ones that took our priority.
As the Members are probably aware, we had one very significant one where we removed a number of vehicles from a site just this last fall along Highway No. 3 and working with the Justice department and MACA and our inspectors all together to make that happen.
These are done, though, on an assessed risk basis, so part of the process that the inspectors follow is to assess what the risk is when they’re doing their inspections. Also, identifying unauthorized occupants is something that is part of the priority for the department. That’s why we have conducted, as of December 31st per the Minister’s opening statement, some 600 inspections so far this year, which puts us well ahead of the most active years that AANDC would have. Their average years were more like 300 to 400 inspections. We’re already well past that amount as of the end of December and we continue to do inspections which helps us to identify where those highest risks are.
Thanks for that response. It seems that I’ve been misinterpreting some of the responses I’ve been hearing, and hearing responses to questions that I didn’t think I’d been asking, so I’m going to seek some clarification here. When I was talking about inspectors earlier, I was talking about inspectors of resource developments, which I believe is different than, say, the Recreational Leasing Policy inspectors but maybe not. When I was talking about variances, I am talking about the experience of inspecting, for example, diamond mines. When there are clearly some that have a whole lot of variances and others that respond immediately to variances and have few variances, those were not being taken to court to be dealt with. I hear now the Minister and the deputy minister saying, as I said before, there are 12 cases taken to court, and now I’m being led to understand that those 12 cases are illegal occupancy cases rather than mineral development inspections or whatever. I don’t know. Do I need to start at the beginning again here or does the Minister understand where I’m at? In terms of inspections of mineral developments, have we taken variances to court? I guess I will start over.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I apologize to the Member if I’ve confused him. We were responding to his questions like they were illegal occupancy questions, recreational leasing. Now I understand his question is on the minerals side, if there was any. There was one that I think we were in the courts with and that was just a continuation of a case that I think came over from the previous lands regime. That’s the only one. The 12 that the deputy minister quoted were the ones that we’re dealing with on illegal occupancy.
Again, my apologies to the Member if we didn’t get his questions clarified or didn’t answer them clearly.
In the interests of time, I wonder if I could get the Minister to commit to providing committee with information from the hundreds of inspections of mineral developments operations that have been conducted since April 1st, how many variances have been found and the number of those, if any, that have been taken to court.
I’d appreciate any other relevant information. Are there any permit holders that have repeat variations from what’s permitted, and what action is being taken to follow up on that? Thank you.
We are in the process of putting some briefing material together. I think we’re seeking time with committee to give them a briefing on all the work that Lands has done up to date in kind of our first year of operation and then get some feedback from committee. There is information that the Member has asked for specifically. That would probably be a better venue to share that information with Members. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Committee, we’re on page 337, operations, operations expenditure summary, $11.770 million. Mr. Yakeleya.
Mr. Chair, the point I want to speak on is the unauthorized use of lands or land development. Is the Minister working with the land claim corporations and the regions that settled their land claim to work with them on this issue here?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. That’s a very important component of the work that we’re doing, identifying people who are out on the land. We’ve worked with local Aboriginal governments to try and help us identify some of their beneficiaries who might be out there. I think we even have some resources that we dedicate to help them with some of the input that they put into the work that we’re doing. So, yes, we are consulting with all the local Aboriginal governments. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, the unauthorized use of land or land development, especially in the settlement areas is clearly defined land occupancy for people out there. I appreciate the Minister working closely with the rightful owners of land settlements.
Is he working closely with the Department of ENR? I know ENR in the past has been cataloguing where cabin owners are, whether they’re Aboriginal cabin owners or non-Aboriginal cabin owners. What areas of the land in the Sahtu are being used? Is the Minister working closely with them in regards to identifying some of the unauthorized use of land or land development by people? This is pretty specific, but there are also areas where the use of land isn’t being properly authorized by either governments, and people seem to have free will as to what they can do on these lands here. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, we do work closely with the Aboriginal governments. We have a website that’s up talking about unauthorized occupancy on Territorial lands. It’s actually a very good website and I would encourage folks out there to go on it. It’s on the Lands website. It talks about the 190 documented unauthorized occupants that have transferred to the GNWT. The bulk of them, again, are in and around the North Slave Yellowknife area. We have 167. We have one in the Sahtu. We have nine in Deh Cho and 13 in Fort Smith. The website actually is a very good source of information. It will answer a lot of questions. I think we even have contact numbers in there for people to report with what they think are unoccupied occupants. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair, it is very important as the Minister pointed out. It’s a very serious issue here, what the Minister’s department is dealing with. We’re taking over a new department. The federal government is releasing its grip on this issue here and transferring over to the GNWT which is working closely with our land claim governments, land claim organizations, First Nation governments.
One of the important issues, listening to my colleagues, is the resource management units have a big cast ahead of them. I believe that properly fit and trained and going through the process, they will do their job as they are expected to do for the Lands here such as conducting hazardous materials and spill inspections and abandoned waste site inspections. There’s a lot of that in the North here. Some are category one, two, three or four. We’re just capturing the big ones as potentially causing harm to our people, our land or our animals, but there are also small ones.
Is this also working closely in conjunction with the ENR department as to you’ve identified a hazardous material site or there are spills from years ago to just recently, abandoned waste sites? I talked to the Minister of ENR last year about Drum Lake. There’s an old site there that was built by Shell Canada. I have pictures of barrels and…(inaudible)…but it’s not that important when measured against Giant Mine. This is nothing. But for the people who live in there and use it as a tourism lodge – and this is a sacred site to the Mountain Indians – it’s an eyesore. If we do the inspections, is this also the department that would enforce something like this? That could take one Twin Otter, load it up and get out and there’s nothing there. It sounds simple, but maybe it’s more complicated than that with bureaucratic red tape.
With this department here, that’s why I said it’s very important, trying to capture this as much as we can within the scope of the work that these resource management officers are going to perform. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, our department would work closely with ENR on identifying and remediation of sites. Again, some of these sites were inherited. We have to learn from that. As we go forward, we’re working on putting a regime in place where we can stay away from issues like this and through the financial assurances division and security that’s required. Back in the day they just went pretty well anywhere they wanted to go, but times have changed and we’re responsible for the administration of our land in the Northwest Territories. We have the tools in place to help us deal with that and we’re going to deal with it. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair, I appreciate the comments from the Minister. Those are all my questions.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. We’re on page 337, operations, operations expenditure summary, $11.770 million.
Agreed.
Page 338, operations, active positions. Are there any questions?
Agreed.
Page 341, planning and cooperation, operations expenditure summary, $6.323 million.
Agreed.
Page 342. Sorry. Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. A couple areas that I have questions on here. First, on the land use planning side, I believe we have a role in that in the unsettled land claim areas which are extensive in the southern and western NWT. I note that we have the potential to play a GNWT lead role in land use planning initiatives in the activity description.
What are we doing to address the land use planning needs in light of the lack of land use plans for those areas? Certainly, in some areas there is no hint of them being on the horizon and yet development initiatives are out there and interests are out there and, to some extent, being foiled with the lack of planning. We’re contemplating an all-weather road through the Slave Geological Province with no land use plan in place and so on, so there’s a real need here.
What is the department doing to get after those? I think that was one of our intents of getting this new authority.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Deputy Minister Warren.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Coincidentally, the department has, starting tomorrow, a multi-day symposium being held on land use planning to start the discussion. We had a number of discussions with a number of the affected parties on a kind of one-on-one basis, but we’re bringing a whole group of them into Yellowknife over the next couple of days to have a multi-party discussion from all different sectors to speak to how best to tackle the issues related to the lack of land use plans in the unsettled areas.
We’ve also invited as keynote speakers some of the ones in the settled areas because they can help to inform those discussions. But it’s certainly identified as a priority for the department to address land use plans. In some cases they’re looking at area-specific land use plans if there’s a particular need and it can be resolved in a shorter term rather than going with the broader, longer range, longer term comprehensive land use plan for an entire region. Those discussions are just going to take place over the next two or three days.
Thanks to the deputy minister. That’s great to hear. I think it would be interesting to have committee become aware of the Minister’s longer term thinking on this just to see which way we’re headed. This sounds like a very reasonable first step to get all parties together and so on, but it would be interesting to know the time frames and all that sort of thing. I’m not going to take up the time here for that, but, yes, a rich area for briefings and exploration there.
My second area is I see we’re talking about putting in place a legal advisor with respect to amendments to the MVRMA, and that’s another rich area. As we know from the court’s decision earlier this week or late last week with respect to land and water boards. I know in the past, I believe it was INAC or whatever it was, AANDC had the responsibility for the five-year environmental reviews or whatever the term was, the environmental assessments for the NWT. Does this department now play that role? Are we the lead role in those five-year reviews, the second part of that? I believe that’s due this year. Where is the planning on that? Have we initiated that work and where are we at with that?
To the last question, the environmental audit, which is due this year, is being led by the Department of ENR but with the involvement of the Department of Lands because of the overlap being responsibilities associated with things such as land use planning.
As to the long-term plans around land use planning, we would be happy to provide the Members with an update of what the outcome of the symposium is that we’re holding in the next few days. Thank you.
Thank you for that response. Given the court case and things being put on hold, what is the department doing? What is the department’s role maybe in concert with other departments to shift plans to support, I guess, the current land and water boards, if I’m interpreting what I’m hearing about the court’s decision correctly, for some undetermined amount of time? What are the consequences to this department? Thank you.
The court decision is currently being analyzed internally, but we certainly were looking at it over the weekend. It is maintaining the status quo, though, in the sense that the boards that were going to become a superboard are now not going to become a superboard, so we would continue to feed into the regulatory process the same tomorrow as we are doing today. Certainly, the process always envisions something that was in the process of being reviewed by an existing board would have to continue on anyway. If there was an active water licence, it would have continued through with that existing board to the completion of that licence. The decision doesn’t affect the impact review of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board, so it wouldn’t affect those ones that are currently in the environmental assessment process anyway.
I’ll leave it at that for now. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Committee, we’re on page 341, planning and coordination, operations expenditure summary, $6.323 million.
Agreed.
Thank you. Page 342, planning and coordination, grants, contributions and transfers, $600,000.
Agreed.
Page 343, planning and coordination, active positions. Questions?
Agreed.
Page 344, lease commitments. Questions?
Agreed.
Page 345, work performed on behalf of others. Questions?
Agreed.
We’ll return to page 325, department as a whole, Department of Lands, $29.268 million.
Agreed.
